Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Feature of the Week: Delicious Importer

BibSonomy supports its users in their scientific work by providing easy means to manage publication references and bookmarks. Since one of the most essential parts of work is the exchange with other folks, BibSonomy offers both export and import facilities to allow an easy and quick exchange of content with other people or even other systems.
A very popular bookmarking web service is Delicious. For quite a while now, BibSonomy contains an importer that can fetch your Delicious content and store it within your BibSonomy collection.

Since 2005, Delicious is run by Yahoo (only recently it was sold to Avos Systems), who enabled a new registration method: As an alternative to the creation of an extra Delicious account, users can use their Yahoo account to log on to Delicious.
However, with the new accounts also the interface to fetch posts changed, including the authentication protocol (to OAuth).

BibSonomy now provides two Delicious importers, one for the original and one for the Yahoo accounts. Both are found in your BibSonomy settings under imports below the Firefox importer. Both importers have two options:
  • What to import? Delicious bookmarks will be stored as BibSonomy bookmarks. Delicious tag bundles will be stored as relations (concepts) in BibSonomy. The bundle name will become the supertag and all the bundle tags will become its subtags.
  • Overwrite? In case you have bookmarked the same URL in BibSonomy and in Delicious you can decide whether the Delicious posts should replace those in BibSonomy.


To import from an old account (left) enter your Delicious user name and password and click import.
To import from a Yahoo account (right) just click import to be directed to Yahoo, where you will be asked to log in and then to agree to allow sharing of Yahoo info with BibSonomy.

In both cases, your posts or relations will be stored in your BibSonomy collection.

Happy tagging!
Stephan