The Community Digital Library (CDL) is an online and open-source collaborative knowledge management platform. You can take markdown-style notes, connect them together, visualize them, share them across communities, and search or discover submitted and indexed content related to your interests. We offer a website and a Chrome extension, all for free.
Below, we describe an overview of the CDL's features: forming communities, taking notes, and discovering information.
A community is where submissions are saved. A community consists of any number of CDL users, all generally interested in a similar topic. Learn more.
Make one for private personal archives, for working on a class project, or for remembering interesting articles.
You can join a community by copy-pasting the community join key (accessible from clicking the 'Key' icon!).
All submissions to a community are accessible by any member of the community.
Create markdown-style notes and submit them to any of your communities Learn more.
Adding a Submission URL will link your notes to an external webpage.
The title should briefly describe the note's purpose, and the description can be whatever you like.
You can create submission from the website and from the Chrome browser extension.
Search and view recommendations from the content submitted to your communities. Learn more.
The submissions to your joined communities are searchable using the website or the extension.
View your recommendation feed on the homepage or open the extension on a webpage to see contextual recommendations. Open the extension with highlighted text to see submissions tailored to your selected context.
See recommendations for your queries and while typing submission descriptions in real time.
Visit a submission's CDL-specific webpage to read, reply, visualize, share. Learn more.
You can edit a submission, add or remove it from a community, delete it entirely, or provide feedback.
Replying to a submission will create another submission and display it beneath the description. This way, any future user who visits this submission will see your reply
See how similar submissions are related by interacting with the graph.
How can I report a bug, give a suggestion, or discuss a concern?
What should I do if the highlight doesn’t register?
How can I submit a specific PDF page?
What should I do for specific YouTube video times?
What should I do for Coursera videos?