Introducing a social backbone to support access to digital resources

Social media technologies offer potential benefits for a variety of scenarios to support access to digital resources. The involvement of users that do not only consume, but also participate and contribute information, allows for promising approaches such as social browsing and crowdsourcing. Yet, a lot of resources and metadata are contained in distributed and heterogeneous repositories that follow a traditional top-down approach in which only experts can contribute information. A social hub that can aggregate such information, while at the same time offering social media technologies, enables new ways to search and browse these contents, and to maintain underlying structures. We will present how the ALOE system that realises such a social backbone was integrated into the MACE portal. First evaluation results provide evidence about the usefulness of the presented approach.