The vehicles for official knowledge, as well as university libraries, suffer from an increasingly visible lack of interest. This is due to the advent of fully digital practices. By studying the psychological and cognitive models in information retrieval initiated in the 1980s, it is possible to use these theories and apply them practically to the Information Retrieval System, taking into account the requirements of virtual libraries. New metadata standards along with modern tools that help managing references should help automating the process of scientific research. We offer a practical implementation of the given theories to test them when they are applied to the information retrieval in computer sciences. This case under study will highlight good practices in gleaning and harvesting scientific literature.