If you want to manage the administration, editing, updating and so on of your collection, you can do so by managing the control of the source file that you use to build your collection. Then, whenever that source file is uploaded to BibServer, the latest version is available on the site.

For example, if your collection is a BibTex file, just maintain control over the people who can edit that file in whatever fashion suits your current environment. For a small department, this may mean each academic managing their own file, and uploading it when changes are made.

A more complex solution is possible though; if you want to manage a collection collaboratively, there is no better solution than distributed version control. Here is an example that works from the repository we use to develop the BibServer software:

* open an account at
* start a new public project
* follow the tutorials and learn how to create a local copy of your project on your computer, and how to push and pull changes – it is quite easy once you get the hang of it
* get other people that you want to collaborate with to sign up, and give them read/write access to your repository, and have them learn how to push and pull changes too
* put your bibtex (or bibjson) file in your repository, and keep it up to date by pushing changes
* use the URL provided by github of your raw file content as the source URL for your BibServer upload
* there you go! You have full control of collection management and an automatic way to have a nice searchable display of it

You can see this in action by finding our example bibtex file in our software repository at:

* https://github.com/okfn/bibserver/blob/master/test/data/sample.bibtex

You will see on that page a “raw” option. Press it to get to the raw bibtex file page:

https://raw.github.com/okfn/bibserver/master/test/data/sample.bibtex

Use that page as the source URL on and you have a collection that can be updated whenever the repository has a newer version of the file available at that URL.

We may in future enable collection management directly via BibServer, but that is a secondary consideration for now. We are most interested for the moment in focussing on providing useful faceted displays of collections, and leaving the management to other excellent tools.