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A blue social bookmark and publication sharing system.

Digital Libraries

BibSonomy allows users of library catalogues (OPAC) to collect and manage the information they retrieved from the catalogue.

Why combine social bookmarking with digital libraries?

Social bookmarking enhances search, collection and management of digital information. It allows participants to contribute and share information. Users can store the bibliographic information which they retrieved from the OPAC library catalogue and annotate it with their personal comments. They can also explore the resources of others, enlarging their own collection with interesting objects and being guided through the vast amount of information sources.

BibSonomy supports library users by offering additional features besides simply storing bookmarks and publications:

  1. Import and export of citation metadata
  2. MySearch in publication collections
  3. Citation metadata scrapers
  4. Group management

Here are some examples of how to integrate BibSonomy with OPAC library catalogues and e-learning systems.

BibSonomy at the Library of the University of Cologne

The digital library of the University of Cologne promotes the idea of integrating libraries with user-created bookmarking systems. They offer a simple link to the BibSonomy publication metadata interface where you can add tags and cross-check the reference data fields. Clicking on the green button shown in the library's snapshot below leads to BibSonomy. Users can then change and store their entries.

The KUG page also shows related tags of 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. The feature that enables the opposite will be activated soon. If a user attaches tags to a resource in the KUG interface, the tags will be automatically attached to their BibSonomy entries. If the entry 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.

BibSonomy at the Library of the University of Heidelberg

The digital library of the University of Heidelberg offers to store the metadata of books and other publications in BibSonomy. A link is offered at the bottom of a specific book description (example).

BibSonomy in the E-Learning Platform Moodle

Moodle is a popular e-learning environment. BibSonomy can enhance course descriptions and e-learning projects by providing the corresponding literature, e.g. via RSS-feed. An example for an integration of BibSonomy into Moodle can be found at http://educampus.uni-kassel.de/?p=110. An explanation is given below.

  1. Log into your moodle system as admin or ask your administrator for help. Change to configuration - modules. Choose the resources you want to integrate your RSS feed in (e.g. glossary). Make sure that the corresponding entry in the settings (e.g. glossary_enablerssfeeds) is set to "true".

  2. For the next steps, you do not need to log in as admin. Switch to the course you want to integrate your RSS feed in.

  3. Go to "Turn editing on" on the top right of the course's main page.

  4. Go to "Add" in the block's field entry and select "Remote RSS Feed". A new block will appear.

  5. Select the "Configure" button in the box (it is a white pencil). In the configuration view, click on the tab "Manage all my feeds".

  6. Select the URL of the BibSonomy RSS-Feed: http://www.bibsonomy.org/rss/. Paste the URL into the "Add a news feed URL" box on your moodle page. Then add a title underneath. Click "Add".

  7. Click on "Configure this block". Check the box beside the title for BibSonomy. Click "Save Changes".
BibSonomy at the Library of the University of Mannheim

In the online catalog of the library of the university of Mannheim every user registered by BibSonomy enjoys the convenience of using this service for the literature management. With the help of the BibSonomy button (1) in the export line of a full record you can export all relevant data of a title into a BibSonomy account of your own. Furthermore, you can specify your own tags for the post. If a title is provided with certain tags in BibSonomy, these will be shown in the full record of the online catalog as a tag cloud (2).

You can find further information here and here.

BibSonomy at the Library of the University of Hamburg

BibSonomy is also available via the library of the university of Hamburg where you can use it to save bibliographic data of an article. You can find an overview of the work with BibSonomy in this manual to create a bibliographic data collection in Google Scholar and BibSonomy.