JISC

Start date: 3 October 2005

End date: 31 January 2006

Funding programme: PALS Metadata and Interoperability programme (phase 2)

JISC theme(s): Information environment

Background

Social bookmarking services like del.icio.us  allow anyone to create and update a personal collection of links, and to organize that collection using ‘tags’.  Tags are simply keywords or phrases that users assign to documents in order to classify and them for their own benefit.  The collection of tags assigned to a piece of content by all users of a service potentially forms a large and valuable source of metadata, and can be useful in helping other interested users to discover it.

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has developed an experimental social bookmarking service for academics called Connotea .  Like del.icio.us, it allows users to tag, share, and discover links.  But where the links are to journal articles, Connotea also allows users to save and manage the bibliographic references and interface with desktop reference managers.  As NPG actively encourages its authors to deposit their articles in institutional repositories, it was natural for NPG to want to explore the interface between repositories and social bookmarking further.

Aims & Objectives

The aim of the project was to integrate institutional repositories with the emerging world of social bookmarking.  In particular, they wanted to develop a tool that would allow repository users to:

• See what tags have been assigned to the document that they are currently viewing in the repository
• Create a bookmark for the current document in their account in a social bookmarking service
• Click on links to related content, either within the same repository or elsewhere on the web, as suggested by the relevant bookmarking service.

Overall Approach

The aim was to develop a tool to integrate institutional repositories with social bookmarking services.  On the repository side, they chose EPrints software because of its widespread use in the UK and internationally.  On the social bookmarking side, they chose del.icio.us and NPG’s Connotea.  As NPG had developed an open source version of Connotea, the tool should also work with any social bookmarking service running the Connotea open source code.

The tool should therefore enable repositories running EPrints software to integrate with del.icio.us, Connotea, or any service running the Connotea code.  It should allow users to take advantage of the social bookmarking features from within the repository without leaving the content item’s page.  It should be designed in a way that minimised the impact on the rest of the EPrints software, therefore making it easy for EPrints administrators to install and configure the tool.

Through a process of rapid prototyping, testing and development, they were able to develop a tool that met all of these aims, the Tagging Tool.  The original aim was to achieve equivalent functionality for Connotea and del.icio.us.  Due to differences between del.icio.us and Connotea, the tool functions differently depending on the social bookmarking service used, andthe full set of features is only available when using Connotea.  More details on the development are in the project’s final report.

Key Standards

• OAI-PMH 2.0

Project Outputs

• Open source Tagging Tool for EPrints repository software
• Supporting documentation for EPrints administrators.

Outcomes

If the Tagging Tool is implemented in EPrints-powered institutional repositories, the NPG team anticipate that the research and teaching communities will benefit in the following ways:

• Content in institutional repositories will be connected more directly with the rest of the academic literature.  Repository content will share tags with similar content from all over the web, and will be listed alongside publishers’ content and literature archive entries in publicly accessible bookmark lists.
• The visibility of institutional repositories will be increased.  Links to the content from social bookmarking services will, among other things, increase the likelihood of that content appearing higher in search engine results.
• Shared tagging will enable new forms of navigation and content discovery within EPrints repositories, complimenting the existing taxonomic classification and keyword search approaches.

Project Partners

• Nature Publishing Group
• University of Southampton
• Synernet