Bringing scientific blogs to digital libraries: An integration process workflow

Abstract

Scientific blogging is continuously gaining importance in research communities as a complementary support to scientists during different phases of research and publication lifecycle. By enabling early feedback from the community (peers commenting on one’s work as early as the first draft, for example), and providing faster time-to-publish cycles, or tracking audience reach to some extent (via Web 2.0 features, such as shares, likes, etc.), it is becoming an important medium for research(ers). While blogs certainly bring their differences when compared to the more traditional research papers (shorter than typical research articles; include tags – a way of community-driven controlled vocabulary – to aid during blog post retrieval, etc.), they are becoming attractive as complementary scientific resources for Digital Libraries (DL). In this work, we present a complete workflow that spans retrieval, processing, vocabulary handling, and finally integration of a scientific blog posts collection to a DL collection. Moreover, the Use case scenarios that demonstrate the value of the workflow outcome to Digital Libraries along with future development plans are also presented in this paper.