Let me quote what I wrote in my statement of research and development interests (![[WWW]](/www/moin/htdocs/classic/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
Seamless Use and Reuse of Digital Content and Services By Scholars):
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The long-term goal of the Scholar’s Box is to facilitate the authoring of compound, multimedia scholarly documents. In the short term, we focus first on the creation of single-content type digital collections of bibliographic citations and images. We are attempting to maximize reusability of the collections so that the collections can move fluidly among library catalogues, bibliographic data managers, learning management systems, weblogs, and office suites. We will answer the questions: How reusable can one make these collections? Will the benefits of the collections be worth the effort?
I eventually want to create a full project plan around his area of "Highly Reusable Bibliographic and Image Collections." Today, I have a more limited aim: reporting on some recent concrete work that I've been doing around academic social bookmarking and its relationship to bibliographic management.
What is social bookmarking? According to "7 Things you should know about....social bookmarking", "Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and 'tagging' them with keywords." Last week, I taught a section on "social bookmarking" to my Mixing And Remixing Information class. I sought to give students some background on social bookmarking, talked about the motivation for using such systems, walked through some specific examples (primarily, del.icio.us), and then highlighted what one can do with the del.icio.us API.
Social bookmarking is an area in flux. There is a helpful chart comparing features of 19 systems (pdf) (linked from roxomatic - Social bookmarks' review - version 3.5) Another list shows Another list shows 70+ social bookmarking sites. I gave up on trying to figure out everything that's happening on this front. I certainly didn't look at 70+ or even 19, or even get to services that I would have liked to try before talking to my class. In many ways, for general social bookmarking, my stance takes the form of two questions: 1) do I want to use any social bookmarking system at all? 2) if so, why should I not just use Idel.icio.us. I just highlighted what I thought useful. Which systems did I look at?
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http://del.icio.us is the grand-daddy of social bookmarking sites, the site that kicked the whole folksonomic craziness. A good number of people already using the system. Though my first entry on delicious was from January 2004, I didn't use the system much because it seemed to be too much work for most bookmarks. In many cases, I just want to have a place to store my links so that I can find them later. I am willing to drop things into a system without putting any tags, in the hope that I will be able to write a script to crawl through my old links, create an index so that that I can do full text search over the collection of links. I took a first step towardssuch a system by writing
a Python script to upload locate URLs in a selected EccoPro outline and upload them to del.icio.us. That script, combined with the fact that posting to del.icio.us now seems more fluid with a Firefox del.icio.us. Now that I have the option of just dumping my links into del.icio.us without having to tagged them, I now feel confident to use the system as a whole.
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Yahoo!'s
My Web 2.0: I'm interested in Yahoo's social bookmarking system because Yahoo is a big company (with tons of users), that is adament about getting heavily in the folksonomic space (by buying del.icio.us and flickr for instance). Yahoo's MyWeb2.0 certainly has features I like, including the ability to save web pages. But I've not been able to parlay what I thought should be the chief advantage of MyWeb, namely, that so many people I already know, have Yahoo accounts, into real advantages. (I'm just too hesistant right now about inviting friends and family because I am not convinced that sharing bookmarks with my friends and family is useful to them yet.) I heard from students who are deep in the world of Yahoo researchers that MyWeb2.0 is finding good use in Yahoo Research. (I'm waiting for the full API for MyWeb 2.0 to come out to see what can be done to make MyWeb 2.0 more useful for me.
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http://unalog.com is the creation of my friend
Daniel Chudnov: It's a place where a lot of members of the code4lib community gather URLs. I've yet to used it extensively (see unalog: Person (raymondyee)), but I'd like to enable bookmarks that I capture to flow appropriately to code4lib and other communities of which I am a part.
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academic bookmarking site: There are two academically oriented social bookmarking systems that deserve further exploration. One is Connotea, run by Nature, specializing in the scientifc literature. (
Connotea: about: "Connotea takes this concept and adds extra features to tailor it to the needs of scientists.") I've started to adding some bookmarks to my account ( Connotea: rdhyee's bookmarks). There is currently no API for Connotea though there's some discussion of creating one. The other system that I've been exploring is Citeulike. CiteULike: rdhyee's library is my library of references. I've put a few items in the library, but not enough to get a feel for how the two systems work.
I'm deeply interested in the interoperability/integration possibilities of each of these systems. None of these systems will satisfy all my needs for managing bookmarks and references. I want to make sure that whatever system I use, I have a way of getting data out of it. Ideally, I'd like to be able to use all of these bookmarking systems seamlessly. For instance, drop a reference in one system and have all my references synchronized appropriately to other systems.
What Next?
I've become an avid user of del.icio.us and potentially many other systems. I'd to be able to integrate the reference storage, discovery, sharing with my writing and teaching processes. I'll write more tomorrow about how I in particular would like social bookmarking to fit in a scheme of seamless use and reuse of digital content.
Later on, I will take up the question of whether, why, and how social bookmarking systems can be supported at a place like UC Berkeley. Is social bookmarking ready for wide deployment? How can we figure that out?
