Distributed Scholars
A variety of projects are working on bringing innovations in contemporary internet technologies to students and scholars. Google Scholars aims to bring the Google experience to searching academic content such as journal articles. This sort of elegant federated search is desperately needed in a context where scholars generally have to go to a variety of individuals portals, each with their own UI eccentricities. We’re still living in an information jungle, and I wish journal content providers would get with the 21st century.
One group of projects are working on making it easy to quickly mark and annotate web-based bibliographic material and later retrieve it. This is basically the del.icio.us model for bibliographic data.
For this model to be really useful, however, the metadata needs to be much richer than the typical content associated with weblog posts. It needs to be “citation-readyâ€; rich enough, that is, that it can be incorporated into citation-management workflows.
It’s for this reason that it is encouraging to read that both unalog and CiteULike are looking into richer metadata support; likely based around MODS.
It’s not enough, however, to just capture rich metadata; we need to get it moving around. Feed readers, bibliographic databases, web applications like CiteULike and unalog, and word processors need to be a part of a seamless information environment.
So what if various projects not only passed around rich metadata like MODS, but could also talk to each other in a common language? This is where SRU has a lot of promise.
