Medical Information Library & Knowledge: MILK or discovery of scientific information on health through social labeling: Connotea and CiteULike

Abstract

In this paper we would like to present the second phase of a Network Collaborative Project between medical libraries belonging to different institutions, located in different geographical areas and with different aims, objectives and interests (some of them focusing on research and teaching and other on medical practice). The main goal of this project from its conception has been developing an open, flexible, adaptive medical library, promoted by the community of participants, with the ultimate aim of supporting higher education, research and clinical practice or care, as well as of serving as a tool for the professionals working at the libraries. The platform of choice for us is NETVIBES.

To achieve greater integration and effectiveness of the services we have conducted a review of the platform and have integrated two tools that we believe will facilitate the discovery and dissemination of scientific information in our area of expertise. They are two of the social references manager with more projection: CiteUlike and Connotea As often happens in social web services, online references manager are becoming cost-effective solutions that are simple, and powerful to collect large sets of metadata resulting from scientific collaboration. These are isolated data on interest, important for every researcher, but at the collective level are an interesting solution for the discovery and evaluation of large-scale scientific content. Through social reference managers selected, Connotea and CiteUlike, the working group MILK (Medical Information Library & Knowledge) has articulated a far more effective cooperation of the participating libraries and provided a new channel to promote and facilitate the discovery of scientific information between our users.