Emerging collaborative services in Personal Digital Libraries

Research on the role of users of Digital Libraries is new and so far only a few articles address the importance of collaboration among Digital Library users. Personal Digital Libraries have a significant role to play not only in terms of Personal Information Management but also as a way to support collaboration and knowledge sharing between their users. In this study we refer to collaboration, personalization and social network as three important services of Personal Digital Library. The research starts with the definition of each service; then we analyze them in six Personal Digital Libraries. Consecutively we address the lack of collaboration between research students and we refer to them as holders of a large amount of articles. We thus propose the use of Web Based Personal Digital Library as a collaborative support tool for research students where they can store e-articles in their personal space and would be able to share them and collaborate with other students with similar research interests.