Feature of the week: Improved batch-edit site

In the recent Bibsonomy Release (Link) we included a new batch-edit user interface - a means to manipulate several of your publication posts at once. Next to a complete overhaul of the pages layout came the introduction of BibTeX-Key normalization for multiple posts. This blog post shall give you an overview of the new idea behind the page design and functionality and the benefits that come with it.

Access to batch-edit site via the gear menu on the upper right.

As usual you can navigate to the batch-edit site via the little gear on the top right of your post overview.  

Link to click to get to batch-edit site.

You will be presented with a context menu showing the access to the batch-edit site in the lower part of the menu. Click this link (edit own entries) to get to the batch-edit site.

Standard view of the batch-edit site.

You now get an overview of the posts that you were just looking at as you did before. But now you can see that we changed the way to select certain actions quite a bit. All possible actions - available for your post selections - are displayed in the upper selection box. Tag fields are only activated if the corresponding action (update tags) and post are marked (via the front checkbox). Tags can be added to all selected posts below if the update tag action is activated, so there is no real change to the old behaviour. Completely new is the normalization of BibTeX-keys for several posts as one of the supported actions. An activated "update tag" selection can be seen in the picture below.

Update Tag view of the batch-edit site.

As you can see the tag fields are now accessible because the proper selection was made.

To sum things up, the main parts of the new page design are:

• checkboxes on the left to control selection of posts
• selection box to choose an appropriate action (now with BibTeX normalization)
• tag fields on the right to enter new tags or delete old tags

The new site design will help us to add new features to the batch-edit site and keep everything usable because now we do not use checkboxes for every single available operation.

We hope you like the new interface. As usual if you have feedback, please submit it in the comment section below.

Happy mass tagging ;)

Philipp

(Classic) Feature of the week: Posting Publications as snippet

Hello everyone,

this week we learn how to post a publication using a snippet. This is a very comfortable way to post a publication. Just click on post publication and choose the tab snippet.

We can paste one or multiple snippets into the BibTeX/EndNote snippet* box. The visibility of our post is controlled with the viewable for field.

Basically, that is all we have to do. But our snippet importer offers some additional goodies. We can choose to edit before import or to overwrite an existing one.

The best part is the tag capability of BibSonomy. Many snippets already have keyword or tag field as in the following example:

We can use these tags for our import. Since there is no standard for tags and their delimeters, we have to tell BibSonomy our format. Therefore, we have to select the type of tag delimiter from the corresponding drop down menu. We can choose between:

• ' ' (whitespace),
• , (somma), and
  
• ; (semicolon).

We have to set a whitespace substitute sign if we do not use whitespaces as tag telimiter. A '_' is used otherwise. To specifiy our own one, just klick into the text field and remove the underscore and replace it with our own sign.

After we click on the post button appears the next dialog:

It is just a confirmation dialog to be sure that our tags get imported correctly. If everything is fine, we can click on the update button to finish the import.

That is it for this week. Stay tuned and happy tagging!

Jürgen

(Classic) Feature of the week: Posting Publications

Hi everybody!

As we allow ourself a short rest from BibSonomy's strict monthly release cycle, the next few blog posts here will cover some of BibSonomy's basic features. We start this series of "classic" features with describing the process of entering publications into BibSonomy.

Most of BibSonomy's users are using the bookmarklet buttons which allow to automatically extract all necessary meta data from the browser's window. Nevertheless, BibSonomy offers several ways to enter relevant information for a given publication. Today I'll describe the most basic one - namely manual data entry of all required fields.
By navigating to "post publication" in BibSonomy's menu,the input form for entering publication meta information is shown:

We know that entering publication meta information is a tedious work and we try our best to reduce the required steps for successfully filling out all fields. During the manual data entry process, the most valuable support is given by a full-text-search based autocompletion. If you partially enter the title of a publication which is already known to BibSonomy, you can select the corresponding entry from a list of recommendations. All available form fields will be copied and it remains for you to provide the set of appropriate tags:

Stay tuned and happy tagging!

.folke

Major Release with improved performance and new features

Good news everyone - since this morning, we have successfully deployed a major new BibSonomy release! Usually, we try keep the release cycles small and release each feature separately; but as we optimized a lot of internal code in the last weeks and months, we built the new features on top of the updated infrastructure and released all of them right now.

All optimizations and new features were powered by PUMA, a German DFG-funded project. The internal migrations onto a more stable and cleaner framework should be transparent for you as our users - the only thing which you (hopefully) might experience is that everything runs faster and smoother. Apart from that, we added or updated the following functionalities (we just briefly describe them for now, and will present more details in followup posts in this blog during the next weeks):

Inbox:

Surely you've experienced the same problem as we did - sometimes you find a bookmark or a publication which is interesting for one of your friends. From now on, you can directly "send" these posts to other BibSonomy users - just add the tag 'send:FRIENDNAME' to the post, and it will appear in your friend's inbox!

CV page:

Another common requirement is that you want to have an easy-to-maintain CV page, featuring your personal details and publications. Have a look at my CV - BibSonomy supports you from now on in this task!

Enhanced filtering methods:

When retrieving posts, you can now add the tag 'sys:entrytype:ENTRYTYPE to filter the publications by their BibTeX entrytype. As an example, the following page shows you all publications of the user 'dbenz' which have the entrytype 'inproceedings': http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/dbenz/sys:entrytype:inproceedings

Automatic DOI-Linking:

If a publication reference contains a DOI, a "DOI" link is now shown in publication lists.

New tag cloud controls:

Now you can limit the number of tags shown in tag clouds to the top x tags only! This feature is activated for all users to the top 50 tags and can be set back to the old behaviour (showing only tags that have a certain minimal frequency) on the settings page.

Improved user interfaces / dialogues:

We migrated several input dialogues onto a new internal framework, which results in an improved usability. Among them are the settings page, the post and edit publicaton page and the batch-editing of tags.

We performed intensive testing of all released features - if you should still encounter some anomalies, we would be highly grateful for any feedback or bug reports - just send us an email to webmaster@bibsonomy.org. In any case, we hope you enjoy the new features as much as we do!

Feature of the Week: DOI Integration

We are still improving the integration of the Digital Object Identifier System (DOI), which tackles the problem of referencing, among others, digitally published scientific publications. As already described in a previous post, you can store a reference to such a publication by selecting its DOI with your mouse somewhere on some web page and applying one of our bookmarklets "post bookmark" or "post publication":

You can, of course, also enter a DOI in the post publication dialog or by providing accordingly formatted BibTeX fields as described a an other blog post. Publication references in BibSonomy containing DOIs can be easily identified in every resource list, as the corresponding entries contain a direct link to the referenced resource:


With our last release, we additionally added the DOI link to the details page of each publication containing a digital object identifier, allowing to easily navigate to a resource of interest:


Stay tuned to learn more about new features and background information - Happy Tagging!

.folke

Feature of the Week: The new publication editing dialogue

Our latest major release brought up completely redesigned publication posting and editing dialogues. The changes in the underlying backend system are even bigger than you as end-user might notice. With this week's feature I want to introduce the new dialogue for editing publications.

You can test the dialogue yourself, by copying this post. The emerging web page will look similar to this screenshot where I have highlighted the five main parts I will explain in the following:

general information

This box contains the main fields you must fill out for every publication in BibSonomy: entry type, BibTeX key, title, author(s) or editor(s), and year. For the entry type you can choose among a list of the types supported by BibTeX, i.e., "article", "proceedings", "phdthesis", etc. The BibTeX key uniquely identifies the publication reference in your document and is used to cite the reference (e.g., with the \cite{key} command in LaTeX).

The small blue button next to the BibTeX key allows you to generate a new key - if the one which has been extracted is not easy to remember, for example. We use the first author's last name, the year and the first longer word from the title to generate the key. In the example above the generated key would be "haveliwala2003topicsensitive".

tags

Here you can enter tags (freely chosen keywords) to describe your post and ease later retrieval of it. Since tags are the main ingredient of a social bookmarking system, they are a required field, too. Our tag recommenders help you to find meaningful tags - just click on one of the recommended tags to add them to your post. Hint: you can also click on the tags in your tag cloud on the right side - they are then added to your post, too.

groups

The following two boxes entitled viewable for and relevant for are part of BibSonomy's support for (research) groups.

viewable for

You can restrict which users can see this post. Either everybody ("public"), only you ("private"), or your friends ("friends"). If you are member of a research group, you can also allow only members of the group to see the post. We will soon allow posts to be visible for several such groups.

relevant for

As member of a group you can explicitly state that the post is relevant for this group. Such posts then appear on the /relevantfor page, e.g., for the group kde on the page /relevantfor/group/kde.

More on this feature in this blog post.

detailed information

All other metadata that belongs to a publication is stored in these fields. Note that only the fields that the typical styles for BibTeX use for the selected entry type are shown. You can show all fields by clicking on the respective link at the top of this box.

comments and notes

Here you can enter personal notes or comments about the publication. Why three fields for that?
Well, the first field (description, comment) is not a feature of BibTeX but the description field every post has in BibSonomy - also the bookmarks. Just enter your notes, comments, thoughts on the publication into this field.
The second field (private note) contains your private comments - only you can see its contents.
And the third field (note) is used by BibTeX. Typically, everything you write there is inserted into the publication reference in your literature list.

scraper information

Actually, sometimes there is a sixth box that is not shown in the above overview screenshot:

This box only appears if you used one of our screen scrapers to post a publication to BibSonomy directly from another digital library like the ones from IEEE or ACM.

The box shows you which scraper extracted the data from which URL and how the extracted BibTeX entry looks like.

To sum up ...

In our opinion, the new dialogue is much cleaner and easier to use than the old one. All the important facts about a publication are grouped together at the top of the page. Furthermore, now the two dialogues for editing bookmarks and publications have a consistent layout which eases usage of the system.
Feel free to comment. We are very interested in what you think about the new layout.