Monday, April 30, 2007

New Resource Rating and Sharing site

Carolyn Y. Johnson, in today's Boston Globe (link in title, above), reports on a new social networking site that might be of interest to librarians and our patrons. Carmun www.carmun.com presents a way for researchers to share their sources and rate them. Registration is free, and they have a topic category, "law and legal studies." Besides the rating function for resources, they include a tool to create a proper (by what stylebook?) citation for bibliographies and to collect and save URLs. They talk in the article about eventually posting the research papers (which brings on all kinds of plagiarism issues), but right now, it's just a chat and rank sort of place. Very interesting development. Besides the obvious grad student members, there is at least one group called "Santa Cruz Mountain Moms" interested in sharing resources on healthy lifestyle tips. Like all social networking sites, the quality ultimately depends on the contributors, but the groups have a moderator. I'm too new there to know how much editorial control is exerted, and it may vary by moderator. Like the site's motto: Students of the World, Unite!

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