Introduction to Firefox Scholar

The web browser has become the primary means for accessing information, documents, and artifacts from libraries and museums around the country and the world, thanks in large part to the tremendous commitment these institutions have made to bringing their collections online (as either simple citations or complete text and images). Unfortunately for scholars, while tens of millions of dollars have been spent to create digital resources, far less funding and effort has been allocated for the development of tools to facilitate the use of these resources. The browser remains merely a passive window allowing one to view, but not easily collect, annotate, or manipulate these objects. Moreover, from the user’s perspective individual library and museum collections remain just that—separate websites with distinct designs and different ways of displaying their information, making traditional scholarly practices of bringing together and studying objects of interest from across these collections unnecessarily difficult.

Firefox Scholar, a set of tools incorporated into popular, open, and free web software, will address these major problems by creating a web browser that is “smarter” in two key ways. First, one tool will enable the browser to intelligently sense when its user is viewing a digital library or museum object; this will allow the browser to capture information from the page automatically, such as the creator, title, date of creation, and copyright information. Second, another tool will store and organize this information, as well as full copies of items and web pages (not just their citation information) if so desired by the user and permitted by the institution’s site, allowing the user to sort, annotate, search, and manipulate these individualized collections created for scholarly purposes. Critically, all of this will occur within the web browser itself, not in a separate, standalone application; the web browser will be used not just to discover information, but also to collect, organize, and analyze scholarly materials.