Patent ID: 7599950

Claim:
A method for collecting metadata related to documents in a corpus, the method comprising: providing, to a search report generated in response to a query submitted by a user, a user interface with a first control element operable by the user to indicate a desire to annotate a current document, the search report includes a listing of document from the corpus; for each of the documents from the corpus, determining whether the data store includes an annotation associated with the user and the document; in the event that the data store includes an annotation associated with the user and the document, including in the search result page a second control element operable by the user to view the metadata of the annotation; in the event that the data store does not include an annotation associated with the user and the document, including in the search result page an instance of the first control element corresponding to the current document in the event that the user operates the corresponding instance of the first control element; receiving, via a network, metadata related to the current document from the user; adding to a data store an annotation including the metadata provided by the user, the annotation being persistently associated with the user and with the current document; and thereafter, transmitting, via the network, the metadata of the annotation to the user in response to a user request.