About social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is about discovery and collaboration. It works on the principle that what one member of a community finds interesting and useful, is likely to be of value to others. This is an especially powerful principle when the people that make up the community are all experts in their field.

IET Discover is social bookmarking for engineers. Everything in IET Discover has been submitted, categorised (tagged) and rated by someone with specialist engineering expertise. Every member's contribution to IET Discover is publicly available to everyone else to discover and add to their own list of bookmarks.

Drawing on the knowledge and experience of one of the largest professional engineering societies in the world, IET Discover is positioned to become the pre-eminent online knowledge resource for engineers.

Key principles:

Discovery

Every bookmark in IET Discover contains information about the other people and groups that find it interesting. Being able to trace the sphere of interest in a particular resource provides invaluable qualitative information about its importance and popularity in a particular professional field. Tracability also fosters the process of discovery, leading you to other people, groups and resources in your area of interest.

Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find the most interesting, the best resources will be the most highly bookmarked. The system interprets this behavior as "perceived utility" and enables the resources to be ranked accordingly .

Search

IET Discover combines traditional keyword search with social (i.e.tag-based) search. This powerful pairing of search technologies provides the optimum combination of depth and relevance.

• Keyword search
  The keyword search option in IET Discover provides deep penetration of the content in the directory. When you perform a keyword search, you are searching the full source content of the documents in the directory.
  
• Social search
  Social search uses data applied by people to optimise the precision of search results. When members add bookmarks to the directory, they categorise them using "tags". These tags enable the search engine to understand exactly what each bookmark is about, and provide results of optimum accuracy and relevance.

Convenience

Because your bookmarks are stored online, rather than in your local browser, they will be available wherever you go. You can access your bookmarks from any computer with an internet connection.