Some of the problems we have been dealing with the question of mapping the ‘standard’ document types to MODS and how to design a user interface to collect reference data. I have thinking about how the other Bibliographic applications use ‘standard’ document types and I think we should try a different approach for our GUI. Or at least give the users an option to use a different approach. So I offer these ideas for discussion.
OpenOffice currently supports only the following types - article, book, booklet, conference, custom1, custom2, custom3, custom4, custom5, email, inbook, incollection, inproceedings, journal, manual, mastersthesis, misc, phdthesis, proceedings, techreport, unpublished, www. This is similar to Bibtex. Most of the bibliographic packages I have seen start with the process of ‘First select your document type, ..”. This implies that, before you start, you fully understand the document types, what distinguishes them and what the bibliographic formatting consequences are or selecting say inbook, as against incollection. What is the difference in format between a book and booklet reference ? If you have Honour’s dissertation is it the same as mastersthesis ? This process very confusing for a beginner and it still confuses me. Also, this list presumes that the full range of bibliographic field selection and ordering is defined by this list, but this is not the case. To provide one example - If a work is a reprint version of an old well known edition – the publication details of the original edition may need to cited as well. I had several of this type in my thesis. If we supported this option with the same approach, we would have make new types – reprinted Books, reprinted Articles, reprinted Journals, reprinted phdthesis etc. Also we do not want the situation where just because a user has entered the original publication details that this appears automatically in the bibliography. This should be a user option - ‘Store original Publication details y/n’ ‘Display original Publication details y/n’ I suggest a more flexible approach to the user interface, which could also support a wizard question walk though approach to properly define the bibliographic attributes. Rather than have fixed GUI panel design for each of the supported document types we have either only one (or several more general panels) with more options. I know that this can result in very large and confusing forms. But I envisage something flexible and dynamic. For example the Form could have Radio buttons - The work has - Author(s) [_] (or is unknown) [_] Editor(s) [_] Compiler(s) [_] Translator(s) [_] The Work is - Part of series [_] Part of a named edition [_] A reprint [_] Part of a collection with works by other authors [_] And the text entry fields (or a sub-form to collect names) would only appear when the associated button was selected. (I have seen this in web forms) I have not fully worked this out but the type of questions / options would include the following - Physical character Audio - talk, music, ... Video - film, documentary ... WWW pages Paper - booklet , book, pamphlet, journal, newspaper, magazine, map, ... Authorship – The work has one or more authors? has Compiler(s) or Editor(s) ? Is the work a translation ? Publisher – Publisher of this work, If it is a re-published (reprint) the publication details of the original edition as well. UnPublished – The from in which the work has been referenced ie (Photocopied) Collections - Does the work have sections with different authors? (Collection title name, Editor(s) / Compiler(s), publisher, and / or publishing agency, page range of section referred to.) Series – Is the work part of a series or collection ? Is the series well known enough for the series name to be given prominence ? (There may be a different field order if this is the case). (Series name, Editor(s) publisher, and / or publishing agency) Named Edition – Is the work part of a Named Edition ? (Edition name) Conferences - If the work is an article, report or paper from a the published proceedings of a conference, the conference details are needed (conference title, place, date). Summary The point I am trying to get to is that the bibliography format should be generated from the information that the user has provided about the work, rather than from the user first have to make a selection from a document type list that is difficulty to fully understand and does not satisfy all the variation found. For exporting the data some program logic will have to find a best fit to a document type list. But we should not force the user to deal with this. There are many bibliographic details that can be collected when we look through the style guides. We could collect a list of possible options and work out how to best to present these to the users. We should think about a new Bibliographic GUI paradigm for OpenOffice. -- ------------------- David N. Wilson Co-Project Lead for the Bibliographic OpenOffice Project http://bibliographic.openoffice.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
