[uf-discuss] Easy book citations

[Fred Stutzman]

On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:

>> If the bib format was the overwhelmingly dominant bibliographic/citation
>> format, it could be that simple.  But it is not.  It is one of many formats
>> in wide use.
>
> Correct, and it frustrates me to no end whenever some BibTeX user pops
> up and says this. It's just not true. Moreover, it's just a bad model.

Well, of course it isn't the overwhelmingly dominant bibliographic/citation 
format - but most of these citation formats are deployed largely for 
machine-machine utilization (Z39.80 for example).  I'm not going to stand 
up here and defend bib as perfect, but I will stand up and defend it as 
adopted.

The simple fact of the matter is *many,many* vendors support export and 
ingest of bib format citations.  In fact, unless you want to use 
RefWorks and a few other smaller, proprietary citation managers, bib is the 
only open game.

Of course, we can dream up blue-sky scenarios on how to make a better 
citation format.  I'm sure we can do better.  But if we do, we miss the 
boat and lose the collective value of all the software that would natively 
support the format.

Anyway, I'll be happy to fill out the wiki with software that supports bib.

Thanks,
Fred




>
>> The last time the "which format is newest / most widely in use / most
>> interoperable" questions were asked, I believe OpenURL was the answer.  I
>> could be mistaken, I've only been on the periphery of the citation
>> microformat work and there are several others here who are much more
>> familiar with the state of the work.
>
> I think the place where we were heading -- we meaning collective
> consensus informed by tons of research and practical implementation
> experience -- is some standard properties like:
>
> contributors (reusing hcard for the markup)
> ====================================
> author
> editor
> translator
> publisher
>
> dates
> =====
> date
> accessed
>
> locator numbers
> =======
> volume
> issue
> document
> page
>
> titles
> ====
> title
> short-title
> translated-title
>
> I've long been arguing we need some relational -- dcterms:isPartOf
> like -- structure, but in my more recent work on my citation style
> language (and a few different software implementations of it,
> includiing one a guy is writng in Javascript for a forthcoming Firefox
> extension *), I've come to the conclusion tha the only critical
> structures that need some relational sugar are titles. Allowing <span
> class="title series">Series Title</span> keeps things simple while
> allowing a lot of flexibilty.
>
> It would also make sense to allow them on contributors, so that you
> easily get series editors and such.
>
> Bruce
>
> * 
> <http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/archives/2006/07/29/csl-progress>
> _______________________________________________
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>

-- 
Fred Stutzman
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