NSDL: Social Bookmarking for Digital Libraries: Improving Resource Sharing and Discoverability

The objective of this project is to develop a model and implement a service for extending the existing NSDL infrastructure with social bookmarking capabilities that promote efficient discovery, search, and exploration of the resources in the library and associated Open Educational Resources (OER) portals.

The PIs observe that most digital libraries do not maintain and disseminate information in the way users now expect it. Consequently, they focus on three fundamental problems in conventional digital libraries: (a) users expect to interact with the digital content and to use social paradigms in accessing it; (b) learning repositories are underutilized and there is need of attracting users in a more innovative way; (c) there is need for a more efficient retrieval of library content relevant to users information needs. The project extends a traditional, Fedora-based library model with folksonomy and combines it with a new find-similar method to enhance the discovery, search, and exploration of the resources in the library and the linked OER portals. The propos

This project is expected to have impact on the digital libraries and web-based educational systems. Its goal of extending the capabilities of the search tools in repository context by leveraging social metadata may have a broad impact within the community of digital library users.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No 1044224. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.