Making BibSonomy integration smoother: New features for the University of Cologne's library users

The idea of BibSonomy (and other social bookmarking systems) is to allow users to manage their references, but also to provide a facility to browse interesting content. This property makes social bookmarking systems interesting to digital library users. Offering a functionality to export a library's metadata into BibSonomy allows the library's users to collect metadata from their (probably different) local libraries, to describe their resources and to share the information on a wider basis than just with other local library users.

The library of the University of Cologne (KUG) is promoting the idea of integrating libraries with user-created bookmarking systems. They already offer tagging services for their local entries.
Recently, they enhanced their service by integrating the tagging information into BibSonomy and providing BibSonomy information to their users. Two major features have been implemented to realize this:

* a browser for BibSonomy sources
* a mirrow of tagging activities

An example is given with the following link:
http://kug5.ub.uni-koeln.de/portal/connector/permalink/inst006/6439/1/inst006/index.html

The main feature, storing the metadata in BibSonomy is still provided with a simple link to the BibSonomy publication metadata interface where you can add tags and cross-check the reference data fields. Additionally, the KUG page shows related tags to a resource in the right menu bar. If you click on one of those tags, you can browse further publications and bookmarks related to the clicked tag. The related resources are either retrieved from the library or from
BibSonomy. This allows users to view a broader set of resources than only the library's entries without having to switch to the BibSonomy interface. Shortly, the mirrow feature will be activated. If users then add keywords to a resource in the KUG interface, the keywords will be automatically added to their BibSonomy entries. If the title did not exist in the user's BibSonomy resource list, it is stored automatically. Thus, the user's local collection is maintained automatically in the social bookmarking system.

The integration of the library's web application with BibSonomy is based on our API.
A more detailed description of the new feature is provided here.

Thanks to the OpenBib team for developing this functionality!

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