Curation is the act of selecting and interpreting content - a role previously limited to content providers such as publishers and librarians. As Web users have an increasing desire to move from consumers to creators, they want to actively engage in the curation role and their annotations can offer additional access points beyond traditional bibliographic information that libraries provide. Annotations can better facilitate discovery and extraction of knowledge from scientific literature. Until recently, the idea of an integrated standardized annotation as “a unit of conversation built into the very fabric of the Web” was a far reaching objective. Today it is becoming a high priority need that libraries must address as part of their services in order to impact the future practice of research. *Consumers as Creators *will build upon current strategic initiatives in the implementation of the Semantic Web to demonstrate the importance of annotation functionality that comments on, characterizes, extends or links entities from different realms in science. We will attempt to demonstrate employing use cases from a specific scientific community and through a prototype within a digital library portal, how annotations can produce far-reaching impacts across virtual libraries of any type of cultural heritage institution.