BibSoup beta: released

BibSoup is here! And it’s going to revolutionise how you work with bibliographic metadata.

Peter has been blogging for a while about BibSoup (see here for the basics and here for how to use it) and we’ve mentioned it in passing on this blog (for example this sprint post and explanation of Bib- terms)… But now it is time for the ‘official’ launch. Hurrah!

So, how to get involved?

• View the features of the BibServer software
• Sign up at BibSoup.net and try uploading and viewing your collection
• Check out the example collections that some people have created already
• Watch our videos and screencasts and look out for more
• BibServer is available for use via BibServer.org and the repository
• Sign up to the OpenBiblio principles
• Learn more about our bibliographic JSON format at BibJSON.org
• Watch this demo of BibSoup:

Setting up a Bibserver and Faceted Browsing (Mark MacGillivray) from Bibsoup Project on Vimeo.

We already have parsers available to get your data directly via either BibTex or RIS (or from BibJSON…), which means you can get data in from most major bibliographic tools already; you can even use the parsers programmatically if you like, at http://bibsoup.net/parse (although that functionality is in the process of improvement). We are open to suggestions for further parsers, and would be happy to guide anyone through making one.

(By the way, we are assuming you will have seen previous posts on this site and will therefore know what we’re talking about, but if not then please see this OKFN blog post for a fuller explanation of what BibSoup is for, why it’s great and what this overall project is all about).

So, what do you think? Let us know. There will be bugs, or areas we could improve, so please pass suggestions our way. Feature requests can be submitted via our issue tracker, and we batch those up into milestones to work towards the next release. Our current focus is on improving parser functionality and also on enabling editing.

We hope you like it and find all this useful… do add your collections so we can share them with the rest of the world, too. If you would like your own BibServer, go ahead and download the code, or contact us for help / support options.