Supporting research collaboration through web based personal digital library

Abstract

Finding relevant information these days is a big challenge, especially since the amount of information resources keep increasing. Digital libraries have a profound role on delivering information resources to their users. New trends in digital libraries are to change from a passive state of only providing information resources to their users to a more active state by enabling users of digital library to collaborate and share knowledge with each other. This study reports the situation of postgraduate students, whom are only limited to scholarly digital libraries or graduated students' thesis repository to conduct their research. The result of these limitations involves a lack of collaboration among current active postgraduate students in order to find important and relevant articles in their research area. This issue is addressed by proposing a personal digital library prototype model with functionalities to support research collaboration. The combination of a survey on collaborative services in personal digital libraries as well as a questionnaire survey on postgraduate students' research behavior are deployed to propose a prototype model. The model is developed using WSDM methodology; and students have shown great interest to use this system through their research activity.