This paper is concerned with tracking and interpreting scholarly documents in distributed research communities. We argue that current approaches to document description, and current technological infrastructures particularly over the World Wide Web, provide poor support for these tasks. We describe the design of a digital library server which will enable authors to submit a summary of the contributions they claim their documents makes, and its relations to the literature. We describe a knowledge-based Web environment to support the emergence of such a community-constructed semantic hypertext, and the services it could provide to assist the interpretation of an idea or document in the context of its literature. The discussion considers in detail how the approach addresses usability issues associated with knowledge structuring environments.