References as Knowledge Management

Management of bibliographic and Web references for many researchers is the closest thing to knowledge management they will ever do. This article describes ShaRef, a new approach to reference management that focuses on the user and enhances traditional reference management approaches with collaboration features and lightweight knowledge management. While this is primarily targeted at providing individual users and user groups with a better tool, it also creates a new and interesting link to libraries, because of the features that enable users to go from their own references directly to the library through the use of OpenURL. Thus, a new task for libraries is to adjust to this new type of users, who are using new technologies to access a library.