Experiments in academic social book marking with Unalog

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Unalog software system, a free and open source toolkit for social book marking in academic environments.

The history, objectives, features, and technical design of Unalog is presented, along with a discussion of planned enhancements.

The Unalog system has been very useful for information sharing among members of the digital library community and a group of beta testers at Yale University, leading its developers to plan several new features and to capitalize on opportunities for integration with other campus systems.

This paper describes a freely available toolkit, which can be used to provide new services through libraries to academic communities, and how those new services might be enhanced by merging the potential they offer for easier information sharing with long‐standing practices of librarianship.