Scholr 2.0: a white paper by Scholars Portage

From the good folks at OCUL, a think piece on the next generation of scholarly portals.
Scholr 2.0: a white paper by Scholars Portage
Executive Summary
“This document (pdf) was created to highlight opportunities and drive discussion for the OCUL consortium in both the short term through the launch of a new Scholars Portal server in 2008, and in the long term by incorporating more ‘social’ means of sharing and organizing information within OCUL’s Scholars Portal and the larger academic community that it serves. It was created by Scholars Portage librarians subgroup of the Scholars Portal Public Services Advisory Group.
With the implementation of Scholars Portal 2, a replacement for the existing online journal hosting service of Scholars Portal, comes a great opportunity to incorporate new features and new services to the OCUL community of students and researchers. This document was created with the intention of starting a discussion among OCUL librarians about what we would like to see be made available.
Our white paper begins with a brief a survey of the landscape and a discussion of seven areas that are challenges to our current environment:
• User expectations are not being met
• Academic work is social
• Citations are hard work
• Academic work is not connected
• Ascendancy of Web 2.0 applications
• Our advanced features are not being used
• Metrics of scholarly authority are changing
Recognizing that many of these areas overlap, we suggest three main areas, with specific recommendations for each, where our institutions can help to alleviate these pressures.
Enhance and improve the user interface
• Enrich Scholars Portal content by bringing in metadata from sources outside the journal repository
• Explore the implementation of controlled vocabulary, thesauri and authority control
• Add user tagging functionality
Connect the citation network to user workflow
• Provide table of contents (TOC) RSS feeds with links that facilitate authentication. If it is possible, allow users to generate their own RSS feeds.
• Provide users of scholarly resources with social bookmarking services
• Consider services that support the whole of the user’s research process and the development of online space for OCUL research communities.
• Seek means for Scholars Portal to be integrated into Learning Management Systems used by OCUL
Embrace standards and technologies that will allow present and future network discovery systems to make use of what we offer
• Provide both permalinks as well as COinS OpenURLs in the Scholars Portal server and to encourage OCUL libraries to adopt their own versions of LibX or promote other COinS readers
• Investigate how to take advantage of the attribute-based information that Shibboleth can provide
• Consider what semantic metadata could be provided through Scholars Portal
It is planned that a demo of the new server will be made available to OCUL librarians in October of 2007 and a beta version be developed for the spring of 2008. We heartily invite readers to comment.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
1.0 Introduction
2.0 The Landscape
2.1 User expectations are not being met
2.2 Academic work is social
2.3 Citations are hard work
2.4 Academic workflow is not connected
2.5 Ascendancy of Web 2.0 applications
2.6 Our advanced features aren’t used
2.7 The new metrics of scholarly authority
3.0 Unlocking Opportunity: Scholars Portal 2
3.1 Surfacing metadata
3.1.1 XML+XQuery=data and content happiness
3.1.2 Metadata enrichment
3.1.3 Controlled vocabulary and thesauri
3.1.4 Tagging, tag clouds and folksonomies: creating meaning and forging connections
3.2 Connecting the citation network to workflow
3.2.1 RSS Feeds
3.2.2 Social Bookmarking
3.2.3 Collaborative research spaces
3.2.4 Working within Learning Management Systems (LMS)
3.3 Embracing standards
3.3.1 Permanent URLs and COinS
3.2.2 Shibboleth
3.3.3 The Semantic Scholars Portal
4.0 Conclusion
5.0 Histories and biographies
References”