@maura_ginty thanks for the question! It's a good one...something I honestly was hoping someone would ask.
Let me start by saying that Shelf isn't really an OR technology. It's not Shelf or Box, Shelf or Dropbox, Shelf or Google Drive, etc. It's a modern knowledge management tool that helps extend the functionality of these core storage/collaboration platforms. Here are a couple of specific ways we're different:
1. Shelf isn't an aggregation tool - it sits on top of other aggregation tools, and makes it easy to surface the most important content in these larger repositories. If used properly, platforms like Box inevitably become cluttered, and finding the right version of the right file quickly becomes a challenge. Shelf surfaces that which is most important.
2. We have an excellent search/browse experience - we offer a variety of intuitive ways to locate any piece of content, regardless of what you do (or don't) remember about it. Our filters were designed to fit the way that the human brain actually works when trying to recall something. Our search looks at the text inside of documents and images and finds things that would otherwise be buried. In summation - you use Shelf to find stuff fast.
3. Diversity of content - Shelf has a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox known as the Collaborative Web Clipper. It's like a bookmarking tool, only much better because it has the organizing tools and information architecture of the Shelf web app behind it. So you can take pretty much anything important you find on the internet, and with a click, capture it so it is now accessible to you and the subset of people you want to share it with. Say goodbye to "Hey, check out this link!" email chains.
If you'd like further clarification on any of this please let me know. It's a question that we get all the time, so I have no shortage of things to say about it.
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