I was interested to see a presentation about Sakaibrary [ppt] at Getting in the flow. The focus was on creating citation lists from library resources and making them available in Sakai. This is an example of what I have spoken about as bibliographic tissue, the growing interest in lightweight approaches to creating and sharing bibliographic data and making connections with it (reading lists, citation managers, RSS feeds, …).
Testing suggested how the approach created value for particular stakeholders:
- Faculty: easy way for students to create and share citation lists within Sakai
- Faculty: “Do it yourself” e-reserves
- Students see it as helpful in writing research papers.
- Librarians: prefer native search interfaces and valuing the investments made in library websites.
Susan Hollar, giving the presentation, spoke about her desire to go further and “free the citation”. I am not quite sure if I understood what she meant, but I associated it in my mind with Tony Hammond’s presentation [ppt, blog summary], given a few weeks ago at the first open meeting of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. He spoke about Nature’s interest in “fielding machine-readable metadata to support value-add services”. And he spoke among other things about tagging (“As a descriptive language tags and tagging are decidedly ‘street’.”) and microformats (as “design patterns with semantics” and as a way of making content become live on the web). He mentioned initiatives for microformats for citation.
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