Hi Jeffrey, On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Jeffrey Lancaster <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I wanted to write the list today to introduce myself and also to let you > all know about a project that has recently been funded by the Sloan > Foundation to develop a prototype CSL editor.
That's great news! > My name is Jeffrey Lancaster and I’m the Emerging Technologies > Coordinator at the Science & Engineering Library at Columbia University. As > we figure out what the heck that job title even means, one of the things > I’ve been able to do is to pursue opportunities to collaborate with > developers (both internal and external) to develop technologies that we > think will be beneficial to our university community, the larger academic > community, and the public in general. > > I’m writing today to let you know that we recently received a grant from > the Sloan Foundation to collaborate with Mendeley in order to develop a > prototype visual CSL editor. While many of the specifics of the prototype > are still up in the air as we begin development, I wanted to solicit the CSL > community for your input throughout the process so that the product of our > collaboration is useful to you. This will be especially useful since > Mendeley has already attempted such an editor before and is looking forward > to improving upon that previous effort. The code that we develop will be > deposited into an open-source repository throughout the project, so please > feel free to follow along and submit suggestions if you’re so inclined. > While we may not necessarily be able to adopt all suggestions, it’s > important to us that the process is inclusive so the product will be useful > to you all. > > For this project, I’m coordinating the outreach and assessment components > while Ian Mulvany at Mendeley has taken the lead on the development. Please > feel free to send me email directly ([email protected]) with > suggestions that we can include in our development effort. As a heads up, > toward the end of the prototype effort, I’ll again be in touch to ask for > your help in evaluating and assessing the CSL editor in order to gather > information that can be used to further development either in a subsequent > grant or by independent developers. We’ll also soon send out a link to a > webpage where you can follow the progress of the project, submit feedback, > etc. I imagine some of the Mendeley people have already mentioned there's been a fair bit of discussion, and indeed debate, on this list about different approaches to this issue. I'd encourage you to look through the archive for that, as I think collectively it represents some really deep thought on all of this issues around this. A number of us (an in particular I) strongly believe that a traditional WYSIWYG approach to the problem, that attempts to model every detail of CSL in a UI, is probably doomed to failure. Or at least, it'll be quite difficult to do well, and will be more difficult for users to work with then another approach. The primary "alternative" approach evolved out of list discussions, and centered on a higher-level approach that was focused on two things: 1) piecing together formatting by assembling CSL macros (rather than start with lower-level details); my original idea on this was sort of MakeBST for CSL. 2) using some simple AI-like code to match output to relevant CSL macro code. E.g. the user scenario would be: user pastes formatted bibliography into some input area, and the tool assembles a finished, or more-or-less finished, style. Simon Kornblith actually coded up a proof-of-concept, and Sylvester Keil posted a later followup about a cool new Ruby library that might facilitate this. To put it differently, I'd encourage you to publicly document some specific user scenarios (with example users from different fields; please don't make the mistake of only considering the needs of the sciences), and also the sorts of benchmarks you might use to designate success, before getting to any kind of prototyping. I'm happy to comment on any of that. Bruce ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ xbiblio-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xbiblio-devel
