The SIMILE Blog

While looking at the thousand different exhibits in the wild, we soon realized that many of them were lists of publications, bibliographies or other collections of citations. We also heard many comments about Exhibit being very easy to use and deploy for technically-savvy people, but that an entire class of data-lovers were a little put out by having to “touch under the hood” of a web page in order to build an exhibit out of their data.

We are proud to announce today the release of a Citeline, a “what you see is what you get” exhibit editor for collections of publications and citations, that can be used even by the least technically inclined people.

The system has been designed and developed by the SIMILE Project over the last 9 months, and is run and maintained by the MIT Libraries, that will provide support and help for users both inside and outside the MIT community of faculty and students.

Citeline basically transforms your BibTeX data (or any other proprietary data if your citation management tool offers BibTeX export [and most do, btw]) into an exhibit that you can serve off from Citeline directly (so that MIT hosts it for you) or you can download and place in your own web site.

While BibTeX support is cool, we also know that a lot of people are moving from using external citation management tools to Zotero. So, we are also happy to annonce the release of Zotz, a Zotero extension that allows you to drive Citeline directly from your own Zotero and thus allowing you to publish your Zotero library of citations (or only a subset, if you wish) on the web. And not in a static boring HTML table like most BibTeX->web software out there, in a highly interactive page, right from your own web site but without having you to install (or convince others to install) additional software on the server.

Enjoy!