Attila Csordas (blogger at Partial immortalization and occasional NPG contributor) visited the Nature offices a few days ago. It’s always good to meet working scientists but especially when they’re as enthusiastic about the web as Attila is.

One of the things he mentioned was that in his opinion social software for scientists tends to focus on individual users rather than groups, which is a fair point. In the life sciences, at least, the lab is the basic organizational unit. Should we be doing more to encourage uptake of sites like Connotea, Scintilla and Network on that level?

There’s a clear use case for Connotea within a lab. You’re all working on the same thing and want to share references – maybe there’s even a student or postdoc who has responsibility for scouring eToCs and PubMed alerts, then forwarding on anything relevant to others in the group. An online reference management package – platform independent, portable, complete with RSS feeds – seems like a good way to organize everything.

Scintilla can also help with disseminating information from sources other than PubMed – news, blogs, events, that sort of thing.

The only problem is that everybody in the lab has to sign up to each site individually then join the same group, sign up for alerts or feeds. This maybe isn’t ideal, but it’s difficult to think of how we could make it easier.

Even leaving technical barriers aside – who to market to? Where does technical innovation at a lab level come from – supervisors picking up ideas from grad students, lab heads picking up from supervisors?

If you work in a research group that has some sort of interal information sharing infrastructure (there’s an acronym in there somewhere) – freezer and sample management LIMS aside – we’d be interested in hearing from you in the comments. How do you share references? Protocols? Experiments? Do you have any sort of messageboards or forums (in bigger institutes)? Any comments on how applicable NPG sites are to your own situation?

(photo from Klass Wynne’s excellent photoblog – www.wijnne.com)

Or, put another way, Connotea is for much more than just bibliographic references.

As Jon Udell so ably demonstrated in his recent post (Del.icio.us is a database), the ability to tag items with freely chosen keywords, coupled with the ability to mix-and-match queries on those tags, gives you a powerful database that is good enough for a large range of purposes.

Given that Connotea has these capabilities (and more besides — see below), can Connotea be used as a database too? Absolutely. And happily, Connotea users have already realised this and started applying it to their own specialised needs.

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Yesterday I give a talk at the XTech 2006 conference.

The talk was based on a paper I wrote for the conference: “Social Bookmarking for Scientists – The Best of Both Worlds”. The paper, together with the accompanying slides for the talk, gives an overview of how Connotea integrates existing academic publishing technologies with the new approaches of social bookmarking.

The University of Southampton’s Electronics and Computer Science department have added the Tagging Tool to their EPrints repository.

See, for example, this item, where the tags and related articles seem to be connecting it nicely with other relevant material.

If you’re familiar with Connotea, our free online information management tool, or with the general idea of social bookmarking then you’ll know what we mean when we say that we’ve released some software that adds tagging and social bookmarking to EPrints-based institutional repositories. On top of that, it uses tags and bookmarks to recommend related articles.

If not, then I’ll try to explain.

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