Hi bibliographers, I had a look at the design document. Looks professional, although sometimes a bit too abstract for my personal liking. Concerning the general concepts I agree. Issues will probably arise later when things get more detailed and specific.
Regarding Bruce's answers to Marthas questions: I completely agree. One addition however: >> What types of item metadata and content can be stored in a BibDB? Bruce wrote: > Pretty much anything I suppose. In my personal opinion I see a some issues when things like abstracts or other rather large "content" is stored in the BibDB. This will make the database voluminous, which is especially a topic when parts of the database are to be stored in (and shared with) the document. I would favour if design and implementations started with a "conventional" metadata-only database and, once this is running, later extended it to manage abstracts, snippets, images, etc. When saving reference metadata within the document, the user would then need to somehow define whether contents and metadata, metadata only or nothing is stored with the document. I am not sure I have fully understood the proposed concept of "private" data, but this probably goes in that direction. >From the document receiver's point of view this is an important question: >He/she can only integrate those bibliographic data fields into his/her private database that come with the document: a) If the doc contains (for each reference) metadata, notes and, lets say, abstracts the receiver could store all that in his personal BibDB and use the same snippets etc. in his/her own documents. Furthermore he/she could convert the document to another style guide. b) If the doc contains (for each reference) only metadata, the receiver could only store this metadata his database. Again he/she could convert the document to another style guide. c) If the doc contained only very selected fields or, in the extreme case, only the formatted citations and no "raw" metadata at all, the receiver would not be able to get any bibliographic data out of the document and wouldn't be able to apply a new style either (since this might require some other data fields). What is your opinion about c)? Should this be possible at all? Are there maybe users that might not want their complete used metadata to be shared with the document receivers? Are there alternatives? --- Bruce wrote: > [...] Why the distinction between "reference" and "list of references"? As far as I interpret it, reference for her means a sort of footnote/endnote citation in contrast to her "inline citation" (see page 12). But I may be wrong. --- P.S. Just for my interest: What is the Kent State University doing? Are they still working with the OOoBib project? ---------------------------------------------------------------- This mail was sent through http://webmail.uni-jena.de --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
