IRM10 – Social bookmarking and ‘referencing’
Kevin Emamy is going to talk about social bookmarking. “The problem with the Internet is that there is just too much of it”. Social tools can help map where the ‘pearls’ are.
CiteULike have a bookmarklet – something you can add to your browser bookmarks. When you are viewing a web page you can click the bookmarklet, and it sends the metadata to CiteULike. Importantly the default setting is to make this public (although you can mark citations as private if you want). When you bookmark from a wide variety of ‘academic’ sources (databases, e-journal platforms etc.) CiteULike knows how to retrieve metadata on the item (these bits of code are open source and CiteULike users contribute to this – as they often break when sites change).
Kevin using example of hi-res pictures of Neil Gaiman’s library/bookshelves being posted on the web (at Shelfari) – people are immediately interested both in what books they had in common, and what Neil had that they hadn’t read. We all know this experience – getting ‘personal recommendations’ is powerful. CiteULike allows you follow users so you can see what they are bookmarking. Also when you bookmark a resource you can see who else has bookmarked it.
PLoS now show how many times a paper has been bookmarked on Connotea and CiteULike. CiteULike supports an API – you can supply a DOI and get details of the CiteULike data out. CiteULike also provide a complete export of their data – for non-commercial use only. Being used for research projects – such as this PhD thesis http://ilk.uvt.nl/~toine/phd-thesis/index.html (which became basis of CiteULike recommender system). CiteULike recommendations have a 17.73% ‘acceptance’ rate (that is user copies recommendations into their own account)
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