Back Again, proposal of a new project

Dear ISEEPI-South Asia Members, the following is an outline of a project I thought that might be of use to all of us who regularly use literature sources and search for them on the web.

Project Name: ISEEPI-SA Bibliography Project

Aim of the project
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The project aims to build a database of online/offline repository of literature, that is peer-reviewed and available over the web using a common search algorithm (one or several search algorithms) where we can access and download. The literature repository may be of different topical areas, including for example indoor and outdoor air pollution, arsenic toxicity, lead poisoning, benzene toxicity and so on. We can restrict the repository only for research that has been conducted in South Asia

How do we build the repository
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Using search engines like Pubmed and social bookmarklets and programs like Connotea (www.connotea.org), we can quickly build a large repository of articles that can then be downloaded, edited, or accessed. Some articles will have free full-text online access, and we can mark them as such. For others, some of us may have full-text copies that we can then distribute among our members whoever requests them. That way, we can build up a large effective repository of articles and literature database sources that can come handy for our personal research or for writing research reports, working on theses, and working on writing grants, etc.

What's needed at the time
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As you may understand, this is a large project. With different topics that we need to consider, it is not possible to be conducted by one person. We need a group of us to collaborate and work on it. If any of you are interested in participating in this project, please email me off-list (arin.basu@gmail.com).

How much time will you need for the project?
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Very little really. If you do regular internet searches for your articles on the web, it will not take much time to contribute to the growing collection at all. Further, as the collection grows, you need not do extensive search for articles for your research from pubmed or other bibliographic repositories, since our ISEEPI repository of articles will already be available to you.

Thus, if you can spend five minutes a day say now, (or even less, if you already have endnote libraries available that you want to upload), you will save yourself weeks to months over time. Think about it.

What will you have to do if you want to participate in the project?
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All you have to do at the time is to visit http://www.connotea.org
and start adding your bookmarks. The process is very simple. If you already have a collection of references, say in Endnote, you can convert them to "file.ris" format (where file = name of the file you want it to give) and then upload them directly to connotea. That way, you can later access all your articles and bookmarks for your later use. That's all. You can also use
http://www.hubmed.org
for your literature search (as opposed to http://www.pubmed.com), although you can also save your bookmarks from pubmed search as well.

In subsequent posts, I will try to cover the topics of using connotea or other social bookmarking programs and Hubmed to work on this. For the time being, let's stick to connotea and build it up. Later on, we can build our own database.

Is there something I can see?
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Yes, for the time, if you want to see how the database looks like, you can check out my database on arsenic toxicity that I am building, here:

http://www.connotea.org/user/arin

Here, I got seven entries. But the library is being built, and we can literally have thousands of entries. Once we build the literature database (unlike pubmed, which is a vast repository, this will be a repository that contains the literature and other sources that "we" want to use), we can then export whole or part of it to our hard disks for using. You can access the repository for all types of machines, all you need is an internet connection.

What next?
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If you are interested to build the extensive repository of articles, please write to me at arin.basu@gmail.com, and we can take it from there.