First Look: Bibliographic page and bibliographic basket

As the BHL-Europe portal launch approaches, we now take a look at two of its features: the bibliographic page and the bibliographic basket.

Bibliographic page

The bibliographic page is a detailed description of the digital item. It is reached by clicking on the item’s title or the “view record”-button in the result list, the item title in the tagging basket, or the item title in the content viewer. The bibliographic page is structured in two main sections. The most prominent part of the biblio page is the item title at the top of the right hand section.


Right section

This section could also be called the metadata section because it includes information about the item in various metadata formats.  There are six available formats depending on underlying metadata, namely: Summary, Abstract, MODS, Endnote, Bibtex and OLEF. The summary format consists of various basic metadata fields, customized for each content type and is of most use to the widest group of users; it is also the default format.

Closely related to the summary format is the abstract, which appears if it has been submitted by the content provider. Both the summary and abstract can be downloaded directly in .txt format. The remaining four formats are MODS, Endnote, Bibtex and OLEF.  These formats are most valuable for specialists, developers, scientists or librarians. These formats give these users information on API creation, references and data mapping. The metadata in each of these formats can be directly downloaded by users.  The tagging basket also provides another way of downloading metadata in these more specialist formats.

Left section

This section varies depending on the material type. Above this section is a step back button connecting back to the results list. At the top of the section two types of information are displayed, one is an interactive link showing the content provider of the specific item and leading to a browse of this content provider, and the second is the ID for the item. Every item has its specific identification code. In the center of this section is a thumbnail or icon showing the material type. All material types physically scanned and provided in the portal have thumbnails. These represent the monographs, articles and volumes which are not parsed into articles. Content which is not scanned as a single part is mainly journals/series and volumes which are parsed into separated articles. In the lower part of the right section is a smaller green block which has three main functions: 1. link to the digital item in cases where there is a hierarchical relationship between journal title and component volumes, or book series and component volumes; 2. select and read the item; 3. download digital items where the item is an unparsed volume, article or monograph.  These physical items can be downloaded in various formats, namely PDF, OCR and JPG2000.

So every item, no matter what the material type is, has its own bibliographic page, but the difference is in the thumbnail, the possibility to download the item and the structure of the item summary. If the user clicks on “Read selected item”, it leads to the final key component of the portal – the content viewer.

Bibliographic basket

Below each item metadata in the result list there are three buttons. One of the buttons “Add to basket” enables the user to send the item to the bibliographic basket.


The bibliographic basket menu with the number of selected items in it is displayed on each portal page above the primary menu. Users can download metadata for tagged books in various formats, e.g. Summary, MODS, Endnote, Bibtex and OLEF or even combine the information they prefer to download from the selected books. There is of course the option to download them all. Items can be easily removed/untagged either directly from the result list or from the basket itself.


In the following installment of "First Look" next week, we will show you how the portal's content looks in the content viewer.

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