Tuesday, November 5, 2013

PUMA in use in Frankfurt

Since the beginning of October a new PUMA instance is in use at the library of the University of Frankfurt.
PUMA is a clone of BibSonomy meant for local installations of universities, libraries or research institutes. Like BibSonomy, it allows to collect and share bookmarks and publications but has additional features like a guided export to an institutional repository (read more about PUMA).
As part of the introduction of the HeBIS Discovery Service (HDS) for Hessian university libraries, a customized version of VuFind Discovery System was developed which includes an interface to PUMA. A few months before, Kassel's version of the HDS has been coupled with PUMA.

The original favorites list by VuFind was replaced by a PUMA managed list. This offers many additional features for VuFind users, like new export and citation formats, as well as tagging. Now it’s possible to export literature research in a large variety of formats (BibTeX, EndNote, Harvard, Chicago, etc.) In addition, the entries do not have to be grouped as several favorite lists, but can be organized more clearly by the free assignment of tags. With the appendant tag cloud, entries can be filtered by topic. PUMA users also have the huge advantage that publications stored in VuFind are immediately available in PUMA and can thus be directly accessed and exported from PUMA.

With the new PUMA instance, HDS users in Frankfurt also take advantage of these features. As part of the launch of the HeBIS Discovery Service, more PUMA installations will follow for the universities of Mainz, Marburg, Gießen and Darmstadt.

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