I have been exploring Connotea, http://www.connotea.org/ which I had never heard of before. I liked the look of the site to begin with as it’s not cluttered and the instructions are clear. I chose to continue with my theme of epilepsy and found searching easy. There were plenty of results from a good selection of clinical journals which were up to date and relevant. There are lists of subject and user tags so you can follow up a subject or someone with the same interest.
The tool is designed specifically for scientists and clinicians and the results of searching reflect that. Although most of the results I found were references from journals it will pick up web pages or blogs as well. This is useful for me as I would like to see entries from sufferers as well as clinicians. Because the tool is aimed at scientists and clinicians Connotea has extra features on some websites such as Pubmed and many journals, where it is able to recognise the page you are on and automatically collect the bibliographic information.
The community pages on Connotea are a Wiki www.connotea.org/wiki so registered users can read write and edit articles about the tool. These include FAQs, a problem page and requests.
I haven’t been able to delve too deeply into the site, as I haven’t had my registration confirmation e-mail back yet ! perhaps this will be my opportunity to use the Wiki !
Using bookmarking tools in libraries could be useful in a number of ways:
Specialist/outreach librarians would be able to collect and share resources with their users/specialty.
It would enable library staff to collect and share information for and between users eg student nurses for assignments
Library staff working in a PCT could share a range of information with library users and their clients, for instance patient information, sufferer’s blogs/ experiences etc
It might enable some library staff to share information on a specific aspect of their work, eg training trends, either within a trainers group or with the rest of the staff in their own library
1 comment:
Hello Sue,
I know this comment comes a bit late, but I'm catching up on reading people's assignments - thank you for pointing us to Connotea.
I looked at CiteULike, which is similar but geared solely at journal articles. I was interested to read that Connotea also allows web pages - I can see that that would be useful.
We had a user in a couple of months ago who wanted to create a list of journal articles, so that she could have a reading list that she could easily access, add references as she came across them, and follow them up when she had time.
Sites like Connotea and CiteULike are just great for that. She can add articles and tag them, add comments, indicate which ones she wants to follow up as a priority, and mark those she has read.
It may not be a direct library use, but it's a potentially useful tool that that we can point users to.
Lesley H
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