 Good morning. My name is Patricia Cleary. I'm an e-product developer at Springer. Springer, for those of you who may not know, we are a science technical and medical publisher. So we are known for publishing books and journals. And our biggest product is SpringerLink. So SpringerLink.com, we just relaunched it at the end of last year. And so today I'm going to be talking about annotations in scholarly literature. So to consider annotations, which I think a lot of people have been doing over the course of these two days, I'm going to add my two cents. Is annotations any note or mark a reader makes while reading text, watching a video, or consuming content? Obviously this is a new consideration now that we're in the digital age. But annotation overall is active reading or active consuming of content. The person who's consuming the content, asking and answering questions for themselves, making connections to prior knowledge or other text information, highlighting and summarizing in some form. Scholars annotate text wherever they underline keywords, highlight important passages, or make marginal notes. Sorry. So annotation is nothing new. In the Middle Ages, monks did marginalia. So after they would complete a document, they would sometimes go back and make notes within the document. And so we can see that today still. Later on, early scientists like Isaac Newton, this is one of his annotations. Annotations were very formalized in some ways. And we still have those things from past scientists. We have Isaac Newton's books. We have Thomas Jefferson's books. And they did a lot of annotating throughout these books. I think as Kathy showed on one of her slides where people scan them in now, you can see them online, you can see their annotations, how valuable those annotations are. Well, perhaps these were notes for themselves. Perhaps these were notes for other scientists. Maybe they lent the books to their colleagues. We really don't know. But they are pretty famous, some of the annotations. And of course, prior to the digital age, we have annotations like this, which, you know, things fall off, lose their meaning, things get pretty sloppy. And this is, I think, typical of what scientists may come back with at the end of their research. And looking at something like this, you would say to yourself, well, what are they annotating? So in a sense, the annotations may lose their meaning, even when they give it to another scientist to look over, or let's say go back to it later on. In the digital world, things have changed a lot. So we may want to ask, what are we annotating these days in science? We're annotating books, e-books, journal articles, scientific protocols, data sets, conference papers, technical papers, literature reviews, presentations. There's any form of digital content can be annotated. And I think someone, one of the sessions I was in yesterday, someone touched upon it, since the internet went live, we've been annotating. Okay, so, you know, you tag a Facebook picture, you leave a comment on a blog, rap genius, of course, you do annotation. People don't even know that they're doing annotations. And in science, we have, hold on a second, we know that scientists do annotations perhaps on different levels. So who's the audience for these annotations? Many of them, of course, are for private use. Some are researcher to researcher. Some are researchers to their postdoc students. Some are postdoc students to researchers, and some are student to student. There's different levels of annotation. You know, not everything that I would write in an annotated document I would want to share with other people. And that's important to note that not, you know, that there's different levels of meaning, different levels of sharing involved. Someone may not want certain annotations to be public. So for digital annotations, a digital annotation could be something as simple as dragging a cursor over part of a text to mark it up. And, you know, as we've seen in the simple annotation tools that are currently available online. But there is a part, I think, of this conference where I think people, from everything I've heard so far, people are, in a sense, using their imaginations. You know, so where can annotations go? What haven't we thought of yet? And knowing that digital can take annotation places that print simply can't go. And I think this is very important. Obviously, this two-day conference has been a lot of discussion about annotating media, annotating all different kinds of things, and perhaps maybe new types of annotation that will become part of scientists' tools as we move forward in the digital age, and as new tools become available. So driving some of this change are these six trends that have emerged in the last ten years. So, of course, you have digital publishing. You have parsing and leveraging of content. So you can mix and match content now in ways that, you know, when you have a set of books you simply can't do, a set of printed books. You have connection with associated content environments. So anything in the past will stand alone. It can now be embedded in the larger collections that are dynamically and semantically linked. And there's also increasing popularity of multimedia components. I mean, in the beginning when journals first went online in the late 90s, they were PDFs, they were static, they were just text. Now, of course, everyone is adding all types of media to really tell the story of their article in new and different ways, as the tools become easier to use. Interactivity and communication. Social media is transforming the way researchers collaborate. And this trend, I think, is going to continue for quite some time and increase in popularity. And also what's important is a shift to mobile. Information can now be available to anyone, anywhere, at any time. The devices that we carry in our pockets, you can access the world's libraries from your phone. I mean, that's amazing. So these trends are really driving scientific annotation. So print versus digital. Print freezes things in place. It's like a photograph, a snapshot. Digital is dynamic. Scholars can develop, tag, bookmark, collaborate, discover and share information in ways that were never possible before. We need to provide tools to broaden commentary beyond text. Objects, images, video, data sets, any type of information that can be included in digital scholarly works. Tools for search, sharing, citing, cross-referencing and discovering annotations are also important. But this requires, in a sense, building a large infrastructure that includes the right tools and interfaces, databases, structures and interoperabilities. And that's a tall order, as I think we've been discussing the past couple of days. But the tools that we have available now are a Swiss Army knife. And, you know, as if anyone ever had a Swiss Army knife or used it, you can do many different things with it. Obviously, you could take a knife and use it to cut cheese. You can use it to do a lot of different things. And some of the possibilities available to us, we just have not identified yet. And that's where our imagination comes in. That's where watching people annotate, maybe combining tools in new ways that others have not thought of. And I think that's very important to help scientists communicate better. Right now, we have a lot of digital annotation tools, but they're not connected. I'm going very fast now. They're all islands. What we need is some kind of a platform, something where we can support the different annotation types. Annotation must be able to exist separately from the document, but also include identifiers. Permissions, private versus shared annotations, support annotation, different types of information, findability, versioning, and collaborative tools, almost done here. As far as Springer is concerned, right now, we're still working on our annotation tools. We do have one product. It's for the German business market. It's called Springer for Professionals. That does include some annotation tools. We also have a product called Papers. You might have heard of it. It's a citation tool. Basic annotation tools that are available, and there are major improvements coming for that as well. Finally, we also have annotations coming to Springer Link. It is on the development roadmap. Here, we're kind of looking at our future. I'm going. We're looking at our future. It's a road, but it's not just a road we're walking on. We also get to create it as we go. This is a very exciting conference. I am very happy to be here. I've heard a lot of really interesting things. I think the important thing is to keep our minds open and know that imagination, listening, and collaborating is going to get us where we need to go. Thank you very much.