Feature of the Week: Automatic Detection of Scrapeable Content

Sometimes when you surf ACM, Springer or similar sites, you inadvertently punch the “postBookmark” instead of the “postPublication” button when you really want to post a publication.

BibSonomy now automatically detects if you are on a site it has a screen scraper for, and offers the possibility to choose whether you want a bookmark or publication post.

Feature of the Week: Improved Metadata Management

Providing good publication metadata helps locating specific resources, discovering new relevant literature, and increasing publicity of the referenced resources. However, providing correct and complete metadata is a tedious task which needs knowledge of required fields, correct abbreviations and optional information.

The BibSonomy user interface for editing a publication's specific BibTeX metadata aims to support you in your metadata creation process. Recently, the interface was improved by adding new javascript functionality: when you enter a publication, only the required and optional fields corresponding to the publication type are shown.

For instance, if you select the reference type book, title, authors and year are marked in blue as required fields. Additionally, editors, the booktitle, volume, number, publisher, address, month, edition, url, note, series and abstract are shown. Fields such as pages or journal are hidden. In case that your BibTeX entry has text in fields that are neither required nor optional, the field is shown just the same instead of being ignored. This prevents you from loosing metadata because of mistaking the correct fields of a reference type.

BibSonomy's metadata fields refer to the specifications in the
LaTeX Companion.

Beate

Feature of the Week: 3rd-party integration

It is often characteristic to collaborative tagging applications like BibSonomy that their services can be easily integrated by other service providers. The Library of the University of Cologne ("Koelner Universitaets-Gesamtkatalog", http://kug.ub.uni-koeln.de/) was the first 3rd-party organization that incorporated BibSonomy's services: When searching for books and articles, the results can be easily and seamlessly imported into a personal bibliography collection at BibSonomy by clicking an icon:

Most recently, the Library of the Institute of Information Sciences at the Saarland University, Saarbruecken (http://is.uni-sb.de/vibi/suchen.html) also integrated BibSonomy into their literature research interface. In addition to the features provided by the KUG library (i.e. the direct posting of search results) links are provided to retrieve further articles from BibSonomy by author name:


We are very happy to observe developments like this, as we believe that all involved parties benefit from such integrations. In the very near future, a REST API for Bibsonomy will be released in order to further ease the integration process. This will make it easy to retrieve e.g.
the number of times a particular tag has been used - we imagine that this information could be highly useful for 3rd-party service providers who plan to e.g. offer enhanced navigation or data analysis features. But as experience shows, the best inspiration how to make the most of BibSonomy comes from the people who use it!