Re: Bibliographic Databases

["George N. White III" <gnwiii@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 11:19 AM, Robin Kirkham <robin.kirkham@csiro.au> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
>  I want to set up a shared bibliographic reference database for my
>  research group, and I'm looking at software like refbase http://
>  refbase.sourceforge.net/ or refdb http://refdb.sourceforge.net/ to
>  replace the somewhat random collection of personal BibTeX .bib files
>  we have.
>
>  Does anyone have any experience or advice to offer in using such
>  things, and hooking them up to ConTeXt?  Most of these systems will
>  of course emit a .bib file which will obviously work, but will any
>  emit the .bbl so I can forget about BibTeX?  Will luatex one day
>  connect to a bib database and fetch the details of a cited
>  reference?  Is there a ConTeXt "approved" way forward for this sort
>  of thing?

I can tell you a few things that don't work!  In our lab we have both
TeX and Word users.  Many of them had been using a DOS package
called papyrus, using a special markup that could be translated
to tex (.bbl) files.  Nothing we found was really satisfactory, so
we bought EndNote, which could import from papyrus via "refer"
format and can export to "almost bibtex".  One problem is that
EndNote uses unicode, so we end up with è, etc. that must
be translated for some user's versions of bibtex.  The database
now has a nearly infinite variety of different quote marks:
`a`, 'a', ``a'', "a", etc. depending on how the entry was made
(many are pasted from online or pdf sources).

EndNote is really designed for individual users, although sold
in bulk.  If 2 people open the same database on a shared
drive they end up with a corrupt database.

In my view, a bibliographic database needs to store each
reference in the "source" or original format, whether bibtex,
refer, or one of the newer forms, and provide translators
and version tracking, so each file can have forks for different
uses (e.g., ascii vs unicode char. sets) and edits can be
preserved for the next user.  In practice, people just dump
selected refs to a bib file, make the .bbl file, and fix problems
there, so fixes rarely make it back to the master database.
If they did, we would still have accents and quote marks
being switched back and forth depending on who last used
the entry.


-- 
George N. White III <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
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