Feature of the week: Zotero and BibSonomy integration

Zotero helps you to collect, manage and cite publications. In contrast to BibSonomy, Zotero is a Firefox extension, which can be used in one's web browser. Since the last release of BibSonomy, we support exporting citation information from BibSonomy to Zotero.

When Zotero senses items on a web page, it adds an icon in the Firefox's location bar. A user can click on the icon and Zotero saves the reference information in one of the user's libraries. BibSonomy now offers the icon for Zotero users. The icon is shown on pages with BibTeX entries.


By clicking on this icon, a pop up allows you to select the entries you want to export. Click OK and the selected references will appear in your Zotero library.



The other way around is not fully automized yet. However, there is a nice blog entry which shows how to easily copy and paste Zotero data into a BibSonomy "postPublication" snippet.

Translated from this tutorial: Navigate to Zotero's settings-tabs and select the export tab. Push the plus button below the "Site Specific Settings" area to add a new setting. In the new pop up, enter "bibsonomy.org" and select "BibTeX" as output format. You can confirm your new entry by clicking on OK.



When you log in to BibSonomy and click on "postPublication", you can drag and drop a Zotero entry into the box below "Insert your publication snippet here". Enter save and the BibTex entry will be displayed in the appropriate fields.

Feature of the week: maven repository

First, to all of our users a happy new year 2009!

This year will bring us new projects centered around BibSonomy and we hope to make the system much more useable. Today we're opening a part of the BibSonomy source code, so it's a post for all developers interested in BibSonomy.

A public maven repository is available on dev.bibsonomy.org - our new developer page. Currently, the following modules are available:

• bibsonomy-model
  The classes defining the data structures BibSonomy is working on. In particular, all objects one operates on using the REST client API are defined by those classes.
• bibsonomy-common
  Most enums, exceptions, and utility functions are contained in this module.
• bibsonomy-rest-common
  Common things needed by both the REST server and the REST client, in particular enums, exceptions, and the XML renderer.
• bibsonomy-rest-client
  The REST client API. Everybody who's programming Java and wants to use BibSonomy's API should have a look at this module.
• bibsonomy-bibtex-parser
  The thing which parses every incoming publication reference. Really an important part of the system. It's based on javabib from Johannes Henkel. Kudos to Johannes!
• bibsonomy-scraper
  Here they are: all the scrapers which allow us to import publication references from more than 60 digital libraries.
• bibsonomy-scrapingservice
  The stand alone scraping service.

All code is released under GPL or even LGPL licenses. We will soon provide updates on a regular basis. For bug reports we suggest to use the issue tracker at our collaborative development environment.

We would be very pleased to get some feedback and hope to stimulate some further external development around BibSonomy. Have fun playing around with the code and let us know what you've done with it.