The ACM Digital Library is a great resource for our community, and ACM continues to improve the services it offers through the Portal, recently adding an Endeca-built guided browsing interface. The digital library offering is lacking, however, in important ways. Its interface is stuck in the 20th century in that it provides access to materials, but does not support information sharing and collaboration among the people using it. I don’t mean (for once!) collaboration in the sense of collaborative search; I mean that it is not possible to comment on articles or to rate them. The only feedback one can provide is to chose to download a paper, or to cite it in one of your own publications. Both offer some evidence of an article’s impact, but the measures are not nuanced, anonymous, and lack of download or citation frequency may not reflect the merits of the work.

The binders interface, the only possible entry in the collaboration category, is useful for collecting bookmarks to specific articles, but its sharing interface is odd: you cannot pick a person with whom you would like to share a binder, but rather you have to browse the list of available binders and add them to your set. As a result, as of this writing, I could find just over 500 binders for the entire DL that has more than a million documents and thousands  (if not tens of thousands) of visits a day. Contrast this with the proliferation of social search features on web sites everywhere to see that the ACM is missing an important trend.

One way to increase participation, and through it, value to the community, is to offer the ability to comment on papers in the digital library. This can be extended even further to offer an Amazon-style “is this comment useful?” feedback option, through which the quality of comments can be rated. Comments can be useful to draw attention to interesting work, to discuss controversial ideas, to make comparisons among papers, and to give feedback to authors on various aspects of their work. The ability to rate comments should mitigate some of the problems highlighted brilliantly in this PhD Comics piece. Even if people chose not to comment on papers, as Eleanor suggested, there are benefits to voting strategies that are not anonymous.

I understand that this proposal requires additional resources on the part of the ACM, and that its budget may preclude the incorporation of such features in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, web sites such as SciRate.com already provide similar services (although without rating the reviews), and merely require an RSS feed or an OAI-PMH implementation to collect the required data to reference papers. ACM already lets commercial search engines crawl its abstracts; why not let others provide a commentary service on top of the collection? It is ironic that OAI has been written about extensively (303 mentions in the DL as of 8/10/2009)  in ACM-sponsored publications, but has not been adopted by the organization. At least the IEEE CS DL, which also charges fees for its content, provides an RSS feed that can be used to collect metadata.

ACM touts itself as “the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society,” and that it “delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession.” It is time for the ACM to make available its resources to be used to advance the discourse and the quality of scholarship in the field in ways that have become standard practice in other fields, both academic and commercial.

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