Adam, I agree whole heartedly with your analysis of everyone creating their own standard!
I have a suggestion which will solve this whole problem which came to mind after reading the recent comment about RSS feeds and script groups. Make a script group searchable, i.e. search groups request search strings, why can't one of the search group options be to run a script with the search string? This effectively allows users to write their own search group plugins to search whatever database they want, whether it conforms to z39.50 or not. I'm guessing that this isn't a terribly difficult change? I'd then be quite happy to write a script for NASA ADS! Cheers, Andy PS Web site updates coming, I promise! On 18/01/2008, at 1:59 PM, Adam R. Maxwell wrote: > > On Jan 17, 2008, at 5:19 PM, Andy Green wrote: > >> I wrote a while ago about getting z39.50 support working with NASA >> ADS, and you guys were great. Unfortunately, I found out from ADS >> that they are not planning to support z39.50, and may remove it. > > Well, that sucks. Their z39.50 support is lousy, but at least > z39.50 / > is/ an established, documented library standard, and suited to network > queries. Why are they considering removing it? > >> However, the new web search feature has tempted me, as I see more >> potential there. ADS is able to return standard bibtex entries as >> search results. So I got it working such that I could search, get a >> results page (all in BibTeX, which I ignored) in the first pane, and >> then the results ready to import in the second and third pane. But >> now that doesn't seem to work. I'm guessing that the first two lines >> of the results (which aren't valid bibtex) are confusing the parser, >> but I'm not sure. > > If you can provide a link, that would help...but your diagnosis is > likely correct. The web parsers are all one-off jobs for each site. > Not hard to write, but each one requires custom code and runs a chance > of breaking. We might want to reconsider allowing plugins for them... > >> Seems it would be easy to get ADS working similarly to Google >> Scholar, or similar. Also, it might be better/easier to use the ADS >> Tagged Format instead of BibTeX, since it includes the abstracts. I >> can send more details if that helps. > > Well, the ADS tagged format is documented, and not really hard to > parse. But it still sucks. Why does every site feel a need to a) > write their own bastard server/search tool b) use their own bastard > query syntax and c) write their own bastard tagged data format? I > know that's not your fault, but it really irritates me. > >> On a related note, it would be nice, now that the web kit is >> installed, to be able to visit a linked web page from within BibDesk, >> and even nicer, if clicking on a pdf (or maybe even other types) link >> on that web page would automatically download and link the file to >> the BibDesk entry. (Someone showed me this feature in Pages today, >> and I was very impressed.) > > Yeah, I'd like that too. Hopefully someone will implement it :). One > issue is that there's often not a single entry to link it to (e.g. in > Google Scholar results). I haven't looked at Papers (assuming that's > what you meant?) lately to see how they handle this. > > -- > adam > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > --- > This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft > Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. > http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ > _______________________________________________ > Bibdesk-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
