Connotea - citations meet web 2.0

I'm interested in citations because of my previous life as a bibliographic database designer. Connotea combines the collection of bibliographic references with the community ideas of tagging and commenting on items. The techies at Nature Publishing based their development of Connotea on delicious code. Their tag cloud gives a great idea of the breadth of interests within the community.

Bibliographic information can be automatically fetched from a number of sources including PubMed, Nature, and it can handle DOIs. You can even bookmark posts from blogs, since Connotea makes use of the information within RSS or Atom feeds.

There is also an intersection between the Institutional Repository world and Connotea. I am involved in the creation of an institutional repository using EPrints and the opportunity to enable other researchers to link to our items is another plus point when selling the idea of open access deposition to our researchers. Many EPrints repositories have registered themselves with Connotea to enable citation information to be harvested.
I really like Connotea because it is a thoughtful implementation of Web 2.0 concepts and also, extremely useful and easy to use.

Take a look yourself!

Web 2.0 - account managment

I decided to create new accounts in bloglines, delicious, flickr, to match the Smilin' Librarian moniker. This meant I had to create a new email account, this time with Yahoo! It's all done now, although there's little content within each of them yet. I have yet to get the digital photos off the camera and into flickr! Watch this space!
Even just creating these few accounts I did rather experience the username/password overload that can easily overtake one with Web2.0 accounts, in addition to all those other pieces of logon/security information one accumulates both at home and at work.
Several of my colleagues are interested in what I've been talking about, so I didn't want my holiday snaps appearing during any demos!

Blogging?

Now that I've created my learning contract, I identified that allocating time to creating these posts and following the program would become more challenging with the start of the academic year, as it has proved to be. I also find it a little weird to be publishing my thoughts out into the 'ether', almost like feeling self conscious.
Susan

Week One

The introduction to the program. Two tasks to complete - first listen to the audio introduction and look around the blog pages. The addition of the audio is great as it adds a 'personal' touch, feeling like there are real people involved in the program.
Second, watch and listen to the tutorial on 7 1/2 habits of highly successful lifelong learners. This was very engaging and the idea of creating a learning contract with oneself was a new one to me. I have downloaded the template and will need to look at it more closely.
One of the questions for this tutorial was which of the habits feels comfortable and which more challenging. For me, 'play' was a natural but the idea of establishing what a definite 'end' to a Web 2.0 would look like is a puzzler. So definately something thought provoking has come out of the tutorial.
I'm off to do some puzzling whilst enjoying the sunshine!

PLCMC Learning 2.0

The Public Library service of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, USA have started a Learning 2.0 self-directed learning program to inspire their staff to learn more about emerging technologies on the web which can loosely be termed Web 2.0.
Helene Blowers, Director of Public Services Technology, encourages other libraries and librarians to follow along too, which is what I intend to do.
I am also writing about this in my latest Internet Column for eLucidate.