[Myexperiment-discuss] IMG Seminar today (Monday) 12.00, Michael Smith building, Defrosting the Digital Library

[Duncan Hull]

Hello

Just a quick reminder, I'm doing a seminar today up in the Michael  
Smith building (behind holy name church on oxford road), in the main  
lecture theatre (first on the right as you enter the building) at  
12.00 midday.

Title: Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic tools for the  
next generation web

Abstract: After centuries with little change, scientific libraries  
have recently experienced massive upheaval. From being almost  
entirely paper-based, most libraries are now almost completely  
digital. This information revolution has all happened in less than 20  
years and has created many novel opportunities and threats for  
scientists, publishers and libraries.

Today, we are struggling with an embarassing wealth of digital  
knowledge on the Web. Most scientists access this knowledge through  
some kind of digital library, however these places can be cold,  
impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. Many libraries are  
still clinging to obsolete models of identity, attribution,  
contribution, citation and publication.

Based on a review published in PLoS Computational Biology, http:// 
pubmed.gov/18974831 this talk will discuss the current chilly state  
of digital libraries for biologists, chemists and informaticians,  
including PubMed and Google Scholar. We highlight problems and  
solutions to the coupling and decoupling of publication data and  
metadata, with a tool called http://www.citeulike.org. This software  
tool exploits the Web to make digital libraries "warmer": more  
personal, sociable, integrated, and accessible places.

Finally issues that will help or hinder the continued warming of  
libraries in the future, particularly the accurate identity of  
authors and their publications, are briefly introduced. These are  
discussed in the context of the BBSRC funded REFINE project, at the  
National Centre for Text Mining (http://NaCTeM.ac.uk), which is  
linking biochemical pathway data with evidence for pathways from the  
PubMed database.


Hope to see some of you there.

Duncan

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http://duncan.hull.name