Our KOOLTools wiki includes an evaluation of an application called Piggy Bank, a plug-in for Firefox which acts like an extended bookmarking system, allowing you to gather rich metadata for any number and type of web-based resources, linking related items automatically via shared metadata values, or via user-entered tags. Piggy Bank is just one product among many developed under the Simile project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Exhibit

Exhibit is a web application from the same stable as Piggy Bank. Exhibit supports the collation and presentation of collections of resources on specific topics, like this research database on musical composers. Since Exhibit was first released in late 2006, thousands of examples have been developed. When reviewing them, the Simile developers noticed that many were little more than lists of publications or bibliographies. Since Exhibit requires a modicum of tinkering with HTML code, they decided to build another application which could be used for bibliographies and citations straight out of the box by non-technical users. The result is Citeline, whose release has just been announced.

Citeline

Citeline is a web-based WYSIWYG edit-search-and-display application allowing the sharing of citation
collections from any existing citation application which can exort in the BibTex format. Citeline is a freely available service designed and developed by the SIMILE Project and run and maintained by the MIT Libraries. It is open for anybody to use, inside and outside the MIT community and it’s intended to provide a path for the publication of citation data on the web in a structured and re-usable way. Citeline can be found here where there are a couple of examples to explore.

Zotz

Simultaneously with Citeline, the Simile folks have announced Zotz, a Firefox add-on which adds Citeline
exporting functionality to Zotero, allowing you to publish your Zotero library of citations (or only a
subset, if you wish) on the web. The Simile Blog elaborates: “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.” If you’re wondering where the name ‘Zotz’ came from, see the next item.

Zotero

While Exhibit, Citeline and Zotz are all in the ‘interesting’ category, first impressions of Zotero lie somewhere on the borderline between ‘impressive!’ and ‘Wow!’. Zotero is a free, easy-to-use Firefox add-on which helps you to collect, manage and cite your research resources. If you undertake research of any kind on the Web, then view this quick tour. Chances are, you’ll be downloading it straight away, as I am going to do now.

If you would like to review Exhibit, Citeline, Zotz or Zotero for KOOLTools then please post a comment here.