On the one hand, we could start talking about CiteULike, which is a free online service. Its main objective is to organize academic publications, now run by Oversity. It has been on the Web since October 2004 when its originator was attached to the University of Manchester, and was the first Web – based social bookmarking tool designed specifically for the needs of scientists and scholars.
In the style of other popular social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, it allows users to bookmark and “tag” URIs with personal metadata using a Web browser; these bookmarks can then be shared using simple links such as those shown below. The number of articles bookmarked in CiteULike is more than 3 million (as shown on CiteULike’s homepage). While the CiteULike software is not open source, part of the dataset it collects is currently in the public domain Publication.
CiteULike is based on the principle of social bookmarking and is aimed to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages (with Furl and del.icio.us) or photographs (with Flickr), scientists can share information on academic papers with specific tools developed for that purpose.
On the other hand, however, we have Google Books. It’s a service that allows people search and find information about any book they want by internet. In the 2003 Google began scanning thousands of works whether copyrighted or not for easy access to readers. By the year 2009 Google had already scanned over ten millions of books. We can also find some entire books if we select the option of ‘entire books’ on the advanced search. The aim of GoogleBooks is to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online corpus of human knowledge and also to promote the democratization of knowledge. However, it is worth to say that this service has been critized for copyright violations.
References:
- CiteULike. (2010, January 19). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:09, January 28, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=CiteULike&oldid=338726597
- CiteULike. Retrieved 23: 12, January 28, 2010, from http://www.citeulike.org/
- Google Books (26th January, 2010). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:16, January 28, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books
