Monday, February 11, 2013

Feature of the week: Organizing a Research Group's Literature Suggestions

Last week we received an e-mail from a user asking the following question:
For our scientific society we would like to allow its members to make suggestions for literature that should be added to the society's database. The group members could use BibSonomy to add suggestions easily using BibSonomy's browser add-on. This works only if suggestions can be easily added. Is this possible with the browser add-on or does it require an additional step?
Our answer reads as following:
In principle, there are two mechanisms to achieve your goal. Both are triggered by system tags:

  1. Members of your group can use the tag for:GROUPNAME to copy a post directly "into" the group, i.e., the copy is afterwards owned by the user that owns/constitutes the group.
  2. Members of your group can use the tag send:GROUPNAME to copy a post into the group's inbox. There, the group user can add the post to the group's collection or ignore it (i.e., delete it from the inbox).
Option 1) works only "in the direction" of the group user (i.e., group members can copy posts into the group's collection), option 2) works also between group members and between friends.
Another option would be to just agree upon a specific tag and then all group members annotate relevant posts with that tag. You can access those posts then at http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/GROUPNAME/TAG.

Happy Tagging!