Defrosting the Digital Library

Jerry McKiernan pointed to this very interesting article:
Hull D, Pettifer SR, Kell DB (2008)
Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web.
PLoS Comput Biol 4(10): e1000204.
“Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information
electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation
material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described
as “thought in cold storage,” and unfortunately many digital libraries
can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places.
In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of digital libraries
for the computational biologist, including PubMed, IEEE Xplore, the ACM
digital library, ISI Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Citeseer, arXiv, DBLP,
and Google Scholar. We illustrate the current process of using these
libraries with a typical workflow, and highlight problems with managing
data and metadata using URIs.
We then examine a range of new applications such as Zotero, Mendeley,
Mekentosj Papers, MyNCBI, CiteULike, Connotea, and HubMed that exploit
the Web to make these digital libraries more personal, sociable,
integrated, and accessible places.
We conclude with how these applications may begin to help achieve a
digital defrost, and discuss some of the issues that will help or hinder
this in terms of making libraries on the Web warmer places in the
future, becoming resources that are considerably more useful to both
humans and machines.”
Graphic and Linked Contents Available here.
It’s always interesting to see how scientists view these biblioraphic tools. It cuts through some of the librarianese.
Stephen