Author: Paul Martin
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The researcher's notebook is a familiar tool in many disciplines and has several important uses: as a place to record detailed facts, as a place to store reminders of sources of useful information, and as a place to develop new ideas.We have previously proposed a way of implementing an electronic version of the research notebook using a novel combination of hypertext and directories which we call the `Scholarly Web Site' (SWS). The SWS is designed to be particularly supportive of the tasks of collecting information (or pointers to information) of diverse kinds, of finding particular items of information in a large collection, of discovering new information and relationships from a collection, and of refining the structure of an information collection.
In this paper we describe a set of tools to support the creation, the maintenance, and the integration of the SWS with other evolving information bases and we report the successes and challenges that resulted from our development of prototype versions of these tools.