Libraries have been in the business of sharing book or monograph records for a long time, and extensive infrastructure exists to facilitate this process, from centralized record creation and distribution facilities to defined data standards and formats. Citation or journal article records, on the other hand, have largely been monopolized by research database vendors, who sell libraries access to searchable sets of records at high prices. Libraries' recent surge toward adopting “discovery layers” that allow users to search journal articles, monograph records, and and other resources simultaneously has created an additional need for access to aggregate citation data, and vendors are capitalizing on this need by selling access to citation data collections at equally high prices.

While the need for libraries to have their own citation research databases and collections of citation data that they can use as they please is clear, having a centralized repository and record sharing system for journal article records is new. For ideas and models we can look to smaller scale citation data projects, reference management software tools and repositories, and broader digital collections such as institutional repositories. However, many questions need to be addressed, including what metadata standards and data elements will we use, how will we define the collection parameters, how will we generate the data, and how will we categorize and classify the records? The Content Planning section of the Planning and Development Research Report examines these questions. Recommendations are made based on information collected through a review of similar projects, literature searches, and informal interviews with key informants in the scholarly community.

This document was prepared by Amanda Stevens in April 2011, with assistance from students in Dalhousie University's School of Information Management's Digital Libraries class of fall 2010.