Folksonomy: the New Way to Serendipity

Folksonomy expands the collaborative process by allowing contributors to index content. It rests on three powerful properties: the absence of a prior taxonomy, multi-indexation and the absence of thesaurus. It concerns a more exploratory search than an entry in a search engine. Its original relationship-based structure (the three-way relationship between users, content and tags) means that folksonomy allows various modalities of curious explorations: a cultural exploration and a social exploration. The paper has two goals. Firstly, it tries to draw a general picture of the various folksonomy websites. Secundly, since labelling lacks any standardisation, folksonomies are often under threat of invasion by noise. This paper consequently tries to explore the different possible ways of regulating the self-generated indexation process.taxonomy; indexation; innovation and user-created content

Hosting Inspec on Engineering Village or Web Science: A case study in comparing database platforms

Purpose – As library budgets continue to constrict, librarians will need to become more familiar with comparing database host platforms. This paper aims to compare Inspec on Elsevier’s Engineering Village (EV) and Clarivate’s Web of Science (WOS) from a novice user experience. The main objectives are to identify some R1 institutions that subscribe to Inspec and highlight some of the key differences between the two platforms. Design/methodology/approach – Information on Inspec was gathered from various sources as well as the home website, IET, and the host platform websites of Elsevier and Clarivate Analytics. Data was also collected from brochures and guides to help illustrate some of the main features and differences that novice users would be familiar with. Findings – Most institutions subscribe to Inspec via the Engineering Village platform. Results from the study conclude that Engineering Village was selected over Web of Science for hosting Inspec due to a more user-friendly interface, potential lower cost, and faster platform updates, in response to meeting user needs. Originality/Value – Much of the literature focuses on the unfamiliar details and not so much on the novice user. This paper provides a unique perspective in how a novice user would prefer the attributes of one host platform from the other. Additionally, the same review criteria can be applied in other subjects and disciplines

Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments

We describe “digitometric” services and tools that add value to open-access eprint archives using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Celestial is an OAI cache and gateway tool. Citebase Search enhances OAI-harvested metadata with linked references harvested from the full-text to provide a web service for citation navigation and research impact analysis. Digitometrics builds on data harvested using OAI to provide advanced visualisation and hypertext navigation for the research community. Together these services provide a modular, distributed architecture for building a “semantic web” for the research literature