Developing a 21st Century Global Library for Mathematics Research (2014) / Chapter Skim
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Through a mixture of open and proprietary tools, mathematicians are able to search the enormous and very rapidly growing literature using attributes such as subjects, titles, authors, dates, and keywords; they can follow chains of citations among works backward and forward in time. While much information is contained in individual items in the mathematical literature, a greater amount of information is represented by the way they are linked.
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To be clear, what the committee proposes builds on the extensive work done by many dedicated individuals under the rubric of the World Digital Mathematical Library,1 as well as many other community initiatives.2 Comparing desired capabilities going forward with what has been achieved by these efforts to date, the committee concludes that there is little value in new large-scale retrospective digitization efforts or further aggregations of mathematical science publications (both traditional journal articles and newer preprint, blog, video, and similar resources) beyond the federation of distributed repositories already achieved through existing search services.
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The DML would enable functionalities and services over the aggregated mathematical information that go well beyond simply making publications available, to include capabilities for annotating, searching, browsing, navigating, linking, computing, and visualizing both copyrighted and openly licensed content. While the DML would store modest amounts of new knowledge structures and indices, it would not generally replicate mathematical literature stored elsewhere.
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While the DML would not want to replicate the interface and social networking features of MathOverflow, it would be wholly appropriate for the DML to instigate and participate in a multi-party collaboration with MathOverflow and publishers of research mathematics to automatically capture citations entered in MathOverflow answers and republish them as linked open data annotations. In this scenario, the DML could help broker standard practices for interoperability and help maintain the software agents and annotation repositories that would allow publishers to make mathematicians coming to their websites aware of MathOverflow discussions potentially relevant to the papers they are viewing.
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The committee envisions the resources, services, and tools offered by the DML as coexisting with, and often enhancing, the offerings from existing players in the mathematical information landscape. The committee hopes that relevant organizations will contribute to the work of the DML in various ways, such as by providing financial support, allowing appropriate access to their content and services, or by participating in the collaborative development, with the shared goal of enhancing the value of the mathematics literature.
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The mathematics community is thus at an inflection point where it has the opportunity to think about how its collective knowledge base is going to be constructed, used, structured, managed, curated, and contributed to in the digital world and how that knowledge base will be related to the existing literature corpus, to authoring practices in the future, and to the social and community practices of doing 8 There are many lessons on sustainability to draw upon, including experiences with digital libraries (such as arXiv) and open or community source software as well as work on research data curation.
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and the conceptual models that underlie disciplinary thinking. Mathematics is unusual in many ways; it maintains a healthy and constructive relationship with its past, as documented in the literature of the field going back hundreds of years, and some of its literature has a long "shelf life." The committee believes that investments in refreshing and restructuring the corpus of mathematical literature and abstracting it into a knowledge base for future centuries is a valid and sound investment in the future of mathematical scholarship.
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