Feature of the week: Post publications by scanning QR Codes/Barcodes

As some of you might have seen, we have recently introduced a new and useful feature: Scanning QR Codes from publications to add them to one's clipboard - e. g. to quickly compile a sublist of references for a paper. Also, not so long ago, Thomas introduced another new feature: Storing publications (see his blog post) by entering ISBN numbers.
This week, we take this one step further by combining these two features and adding a little spice to the recipe!

Now it is possible to scan documents with embedded Bibsonomy QR Codes to post the according publications. BibSonomy collects all available data of your document automatically and redirects you to the edit publication page. And the best thing: This does not only work with QR Codes. You can now also also automatically post books by scanning the barcode on their respective back sides.

Here is how it works:

Navigate to the post publication page.

The BibSonomy homepage with the post publication navigation entry.

Click the scan code tab on the tabular navigation of the page to see the new Code Scanner.

After successfully scanning the respective code, BibSonomy will redirect you to the corresponding edit publication site, so that you can check the extracted inputs.

The Bibsonomy edit publication page with the extracted inputs.

We hope to improve your daily workflow on BibSonomy with this new feature. You can now add publications of colleagues to your own collection by simply scanning their printed versions without having to look them up on BibSonomy first.

Happy scanning!

Philipp

Feature of the week: Organize your publications with the help of QR Codes

Organizing your publications became easier with the help of BibSonomy. Now the workflow will even become more comfortable. We introduce a brand new experimental feature to help you putting together references with the help of QR Codes.

We implemented the possibility to automatically embed a QR Code containing the URL of the corresponding BibSonomy post into your uploaded documents which can be read and decoded by the new QR Code scanner inside the clipboard. Of course you can always choose to download your document with or without the QR Code.

After uploading a private copy of one of your collected publications you will recognize a new entry on the right side of the already familiar download link reading "including a QR Code":

The red box marks the link to click if you want BibSonomy to embed the QR Code into the copy of your document. The modified version is provided as a direct download - same as usual. 

The QR Code can be read by any QR Code reader. It contains the URL to the corresponding post. The new QR Code scanner on the clipboard page goes even further and immediately adds the corresponding post to your clipboard. Simply hold the QR code in front of your webcam such that the code appears in the designated area in the sidebar of the clipboard page.

After sucessfully decoding the QR-Code, you'll hear the "snap sound"  and the post that belongs to your publication will have been added to your clipboard.  

Workflow suggestion:

When writing a paper for your studies you search for related work and references. Create posts on BibSonomy to get a digital representation of your reference collection. Procede by printing these references with an embedded QR Code. Finally you can put together the papers you actually want to cite by scanning them with the QR Code scanner.

This gives you the opportunity to compile a sublist of your collection of publications in the blink of an eye without having to remember where the corresponding post is located.

We are currently working to make the feature even faster. Stay tuned for one of our next updates.

Happy Scanning

Philipp

PS: For the QR Code Scanner to work, you have to install the flash plugin on your system.

Feature of the Week: Shared (PDF) document management with BibSonomy

When managing a literature database, often people want to store a full-text copy (e.g., a PDF document) of a publication in addition to its metadata (i.e., BibTex entry). To enable an easy access from everywhere to these documents, BibSonomy allows to upload a private PDF or postscript copy for each post via the post details page, e.g. for my case:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/283b2de310e014240257ea3ee774213aa/dbenz

(Please note that only the owner of the entry can upload such a file). In the past, BibSonomy has treated these files as private only, i.e, they were only available for download to the owner himself. After several inquiries, we have opened up this restriction to groups: It is now possible to easily share PDF documents within your research colleagues. By default, when you are logged in as a group member (e.g. of the group kde), then you see a little document icon on the group page next to those entries for which any group member has uploaded a document:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/kde


(Please note again that you can only see the attached documents when you are a member of group kde.) You can disable this feature by appending ?showPDF=false to the URL. If you would like to restrict your view to only those documents with an attached document, use:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/kde?filter=myGroupPDF

Apart from that, your own documents are also accessible via your personal user page (you need to be logged in for that):

http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/dbenz
displays your own entries, along with document icons, if available

http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/dbenz?filter=myPDF
displays only those entries out of your collection which have a document attached

We think that this feature contributes to the usefulness of BibSonomy as a complete collaborative literature database tool for research groups! If you have suggestions how this can be improved, we'd be glad to hear from you.

Best,
Dominik

Feature of the Week

Extend your publication entries by adding a .pdf/ps file and a private note

Besides assigning tags to your BibTex entry with BibSonomy, you can extend your entries by uploading a local copy of publication as .pdf or .ps document. In addition, you can assign some private notes, which are only visible for you. This notes can contain some personal thoughts like “this paper is important for my research” or a short summary about the content. For example: You just posted the following publication: “Network Properties of Folksonomies” and would like to extend your entry with a local copy as .pdf or .ps file. You just simply click on the title and get the following options (see figure at the top). Try it and have fun, Miranda!