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.