CDL

The Community Digital Library

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.

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What we offer

Below, we describe an overview of the CDL's features: forming communities, taking notes, and discovering information.

Benefits

Form Communities

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.

Create a Community

Make one for private personal archives, for working on a class project, or for remembering interesting articles.

Join a Community

You can join a community by copy-pasting the community join key (accessible from clicking the 'Key' icon!).

Explore with Other Members

All submissions to a community are accessible by any member of the community.

Benefits

Make Submissions

Create markdown-style notes and submit them to any of your communities Learn more.

Optionally Add a Webpage

Adding a Submission URL will link your notes to an external webpage.

Add a Title and Description

The title should briefly describe the note's purpose, and the description can be whatever you like.

Submit from Anywhere

You can create submission from the website and from the Chrome browser extension.

Benefits

Discover Information

Search and view recommendations from the content submitted to your communities. Learn more.

Search Your Communities

The submissions to your joined communities are searchable using the website or the extension.

Get Recommendations

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.

Automatic Suggestions

See recommendations for your queries and while typing submission descriptions in real time.

Benefits

Interact with Submissions

Visit a submission's CDL-specific webpage to read, reply, visualize, share. Learn more.

Edit, Delete, Share

You can edit a submission, add or remove it from a community, delete it entirely, or provide feedback.

Reply

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

Visualize

See how similar submissions are related by interacting with the graph.

Frequently Asked Questions

Please use the "Feedback" link in the footer or email Kevin Ros at [email protected]
For some pages, your highlighted text will not be captured by the extension. You can tell that this is the case when the “Highlighted text” area doesn’t display any text. If you want to save the highlighted text in the context or ask a question about the highlighted text, then first copy-paste it into the field right below the highlighted text display.
You can add a fragment in the URL. For example, if you would like to submit page 9 of this PDF, you can add “#page=9” to the end of the URL in the address bar. That results in this link. Once you do this, you can open the extension, and it will pull the URL with the fragment for a submission.
If you want to make a submission at a specific time, you can change the webpage URL to include the video time (right click video → copy URL at current time → paste into address bar). Once you do this, you can open the extension, and it will pull the URL with the fragment for a submission.
You can highlight the transcript and open the extension, and it should register the highlighted text.

Ready to try out our extension?

Download for Free
The Community Digital Library (CDL) is an online and open-source social bookmarking platform that allows you to collaboratively describe and save, search for, and discover webpages related to your interests. We offer a stand-alone website and a Chrome extension, all for free.
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