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!