Matthew,
I don't know what motivated you or your organization to choose MODS; the
main problem I see is that MODS is nowhere as standardized as biblatex,
bibtex (which I would consider to be too limited for serious use though),
or CSL; so if I were you I'd probably try to use one of these formats for
my database instead.
Still, if you must use MODS, some background on citeproc-hs and
pandoc-citeproc:
citeproc-hs and pandoc-citeproc incorporate bibutils to first convert all
bibliography database input formats bibutils recognizes to MODS (with the
exception of CSL JSON and MODS itself for citeproc-hs, and CSL JSON, CSL
YAML, bibtex, biblatex, and MODS for pandoc-citeproc).
Thus, as Andrea Rossato, the citeproc-hs author, has pointed out
repeatedly, citeproc-hs's MODS parser has been written with the sole aim of
parsing MODS records generated by bibutils, and nothing else, so depending
on the MODS flavour you will be using, your mileage may vary considerably.
Unfortunately, the whatever-to-MODS (bibutils) and MODS-to-CSL JSON
(citeproc-hs) routines suffered from many bugs, some of which have not been
fixed to this date (for open bug reports see
http://sourceforge.net/p/bibutils/discussion/general/ and
http://code.google.com/p/citeproc-hs/issues).
pandoc-citeproc inherited the citeproc-hs MODS parser essentially
unchanged, and since pandoc-citeproc bypasses the MODS-related routines of
both bibutils and citeproc-hs completely for what appear to be its most
popular input formats, biblatex and bibtex (CSL JSON or CSL YAML not
needing conversion anyway), there has never been much demand on the
pandoc-citeproc forum for fixing MODS-related bugs.
That being said, if you want to get an idea of whether pandoc-citeproc's
MODS-to-CSL JSON conversion could work for you, try `pandoc-citeproc
--bib2json yourbibfile.mods`.
Best,
Nick
On 1 December 2014 at 19:37, Matthew Roth <matthew.g.r...@yale.edu> wrote:
> Hi List, [NOTE that this is a cross post from the MODS listserv[0]--this
> maybe a better place to post] After careful consideration over the past
> several months our web application has decided to store our citations in
> MODs as opposed to our propriety and often problematic relational
> structure. Great news for sure. We are now able to generate EndNote files,
> RIS files, BibTex files, DC, and MARCXML. With the latter two being less
> desired by our end users. Ideally our board of directors and (more
> importantly) our end users would like to generate formatted HTML citations
> in various formats. For example, the way Google scholar will give the user
> the choice of MLA, ALA, and Chicago. The problem looks to be that while
> there are several leads, no available resource exists for a proper HTML
> transformation. The most promising one is the citeproc project and the
> Citation Style Language[1]. They have projects in various stages in
> multiple languages. However, of the list I am only able to function in
> java, python, and JavaScript. The problem to me is that most expect a JSON
> format that is not too well documented--as best as I can tell, some of the
> discussions I've come across on this format our several years old at this
> point. Only one purports to work with MODs. citeproc-hs[2] a haskell
> library seems to have once expected MODs, but 1. I am not familiar with
> haskell and two it appears to not have been kept to date. I have not ruled
> it out completely, but need to consult a primer on haskell first. The
> python library, citeproc-py[3] claims to work with bibtex. However, they
> are still having issues with UTF-8[4]. Additionally, either the mapping is
> off in their BibTex parser or bibutils[5] is producing poor BibTex files
> from the inputted MODs files. Finally, the library according to the
> README.rst[6] is still not ready for production. Ideally, there would be an
> Xquery/XSL transformation that we could call from our web application which
> is built upon exist-db[7]. I suppose our next step may be writing our own
> transformation, however, it seems like coming to this as a programmer and
> not a librarian I may not be searching in all the right places. Do I need
> to write my own transformation, or has the wheel already been created? Best,
> Matt
>
> PS I apologize if I have misrepresented anything about CSL and the various
> citeproc projects. I am still only a couple weeks old to this project.
> [0]http://listserv.loc.gov/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind1412&L=mods [1]
> http://citationstyles.org/ [2]
> https://hackage.haskell.org/package/citeproc-hs [3]
> https://github.com/brechtm/citeproc-py [4]
> https://github.com/brechtm/citeproc-py/issues/25 [5]
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/bibutils/ [6]
> https://github.com/brechtm/citeproc-py/blob/master/README.rst#citeproc-py
> [7]http://exist-db.org/exist/apps/homepage/index.html
>
>
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