Networked Multimedia Information Systems Laboratory


ScholarLynk

Contact person: Paolo Manghi

Scholarly research involves a systematic study of information sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions. It encompasses survey, analysis, evaluation, and creation as distinct phases that are performed iteratively and often in parallel by accessing a range of local and remote resources. Throughout these activities scholars create collections of relevant work, ranging from publication references to new information acquired through experiments or correspondence with other scholars. We use the term reading list to refer to such collections. Existing software packages or web services for managing publication lists, like CiteULike, lack integration with researchers‟ workflow which may require access to both desktop and online resources. ScholarLynk is a desktop tagging tool that enables researchers to build and maintain reading lists across distributed data stores, in collaboration with other researchers. Central to the design is the generalized concept of a reading list which we extend to designate a grouping of any types of resources, from academic papers to web pages and emails, and to include comprehensive metadata, annotations, and associations among items in the list. The novelty of ScholarLynk is twofold: (i) it implements tagging in the desktop environment to enable the collection of resources across distributed storage locations by an individual or a group, thus providing a unified interface for managing desktop and web data sources, and (ii) it provides an architecture that unifies search over different content repositories, tagging, and social interaction, thus supporting a collaborative environment.