On Mar 1, 2006, at 5:01 PM, Matt Price wrote:
I guess where I want to go is to get rid of Endnote, and have a script
within Word and OOo that allows formatting of references from web
sources. Clearly that'll take some work though.
That sounds great -- though my preference would not be to get rid of
the desktop application altogether.
I agree!
There are lots of occasions when
a desktop tool is very handy (e.g., in the library when taking notes
on your aging non-wifi laptop). In any case I don't have the
impression that such a tool actually exists yet. Or do you think lots
of the pieces are already out there?
Let me put it this way: the technology is there.
I've recently been advocating (and actively doing some development work
on) porting citeproc to Ruby and Python, and it's in part with the mind
to be able to add to next-generation web apps.
So imagine starting with a nice Ajax-based wiki-like app for editing,
and then being able to just add a module to get citation processing.
3) what kinds of stuff do you need to store?
a) journal articles, books, chapters -- the standard humanities
reference types;
Secondary sources of this type are easy. It's when you start getting
into archival documents and such that I think a lot of apps choke
(because their data models were never designed to be general enough to
handle that).
b) Working Papers of the research group members -- so references
linked to PDF/doc/odt files, perhaps?
OK.
c) one individual has a scheme for storing and tagging video clips from
the news (technical details NOT AT ALL thought out at this point). In
principal such clips might be tied in to the bibliographic system.
As someone who sometimes deals with media content, I think yes. But
again, many bib apps aren't designed for this.
Integrating (c) into the bibliography might be a way to ensure that
there's funding to hire someone to do some sql/php/python
programming. emphasis on *might*.
It might be worth noting that Peter Sefton (on the dev list) is
involved in a Python-based project out of Australia that might have
some similar requirements.
I'll tell you my perspective these days:
I think the future of bibliographic storage and managements is the web.
Apps like Endnote are really rather archaic in the grand scheme of
things, and what we need are apps that are built with the recognition
of how much contemporary scholars are web-centric these days. The new
work I'm doing involves mostly web-sourced content.
But what I have in mind is a little different than the traditional
portal app. What I want is really something *like* CiteULike or UnaLog
or Connotea, where I can hit a bookmarklet button on my browser and it
will persist the relevant citation metadata. But I want something with
a richer data model (one, ahem, not just design for people from the
sciences), and which can work on a distributed model. In that model, I
would hardly ever have to manually enter of edit bib records. It would
conform to my disjointed web-based workflow without me having to
stress.
Citation formatting would then be integrated into editing environments,
with something like citeproc. So maybe a little scripting would allow
querying the remote DB and integrating content into documents.
From what I gather, it shouldn't be rocket science to integrate a
scripting-language based version of citeproc into Word to replace the
Endnote formatting functionality, particularly with the new XML formats
MS is pushing (which are structurally quite similar to ODF). I really
think this is where to focus now, because we need that prototype for
OOo too.
... of which refbase seemed to me the most immediately intuitive. I
haven't looked at the codebase yet, but given that it's written in
PHP, interacts well with MODS and bibutils, and that several modified
versions are already in operation elsewhere, I imagine it's not hard
to add features or change the look.
Agree on all of the above.
As Bruce mar recall, I'm something of a fan of RefDB, but that seems
quite inappropriate for
this project, given the userbase.
Probably true.
Bruce
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