Libraries are for sharing
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.