The Ideal 2.0 Scholarly Portal
In late November, I'll be in London speaking at the Ingenta Publisher Forum. At this event, Ingenta's publisher customers meet with company representatives to hear about new developments and future plans for IngentaConnect, and to hear from invited industry insiders. I'll be one of the insiders.
The focus of my talk will be Library 2.0 and how these concepts can be applied to scholarly portals. Right now, few portals have shown the kind of innovation that incorporates Web 2.0 technologies to meet the expectations of today's researchers.
So I've been thinking about the ideal scholarly portal. If we had the world to choose from, what would such a portal consist of? Here's what I've come up with so far:
Ajax-powered search. This works particularly well for journal titles, and would be amazing if article titles could be included. When you type one or more keywords, a dropdown appears that displays titles containing your words. Example: ejournals at Georgia Tech.
Custom search. A combination of the features of Rollyo and Eurekster Swicki would be great. You could select the specific journals and/or sites to search, designate keywords applied all searches, mark journals or sites for priority search, generate a tag cloud that could be altered based on your or other users' behavior, and alter relevancy ranking of results based on click behavior, downloads, citations, user ratings, tags, or other relevancy designations you can make.
User input. Comments, ratings, notes, discussion on blogs, chat, etc.
Tags. Users can tag items, and these tags become searchable.
Tag clouds. These should be customizable, including by discpline.
Bibliography builder. As with PennTags, users can build and tag annotated bibliographies. Project sharing should be an option.
RSS notifications of new articles. A growing number of portals offer this. They all should. And - based on a previous entry in this blog - these RSS links should solve the current authentication problem for off-campus users.
Linking to social bookmark sites. IngentaConnect does this, and maybe a few others, but this is relatively rare.
Links to related internal content. "People who downloaded this article also downloaded..."
Author interviews on podcasts.
Etc. Your ideas go here!
I'll be continuing to think about other features between now and the time of my talk. When I get back from London in early December, I'll report on the reaction to all this.
Comments
Something else I'd love to see from scholarly portals/database vendors - open honest blogging! I get tired of the spin from the marketing people, and it would be good to hear from ordinary people from the companies for a change...
Looking forward to hearing how it goes in November!
Posted by: CW | October 23, 2006 06:44 PM
...and open access to the peer-reviewed research articles from that publisher or on that topic.
Posted by: Peter Suber | December 6, 2006 01:28 PM
Good points. I'll add:
- A large, vital user community that propels development of the software.
- REST-ful access to portal resources so that users can create mashups and discover new ways to use the portal.
- Security. Keep out the spammers and protect the privacy of users.
Posted by: Sean Gillies | December 6, 2006 02:10 PM
Thinking about Sean's point, about a "large, vital user community", I say: If you invite them, they will come! The "invitation" in this case is exactly the mix of Web 2.0 features that Laura describes, that will grab, and hold, a community of users: look at what LibraryThing has achieved. REST-fulness - in its broader, pragmatic sense (as interpreted by, say, Flickr) - definitely. Spammers and privacy also seem well enough dealt with in the Web 2.0 world-at-large to suggest that this shouldn't be rocket-science either.
Let's do it!
Posted by: Jerry Bakewell | December 6, 2006 10:17 PM