Forum OpenACS Q&A: BIbliography Package

Collapse
1: BIbliography Package
Posted by Matthew Burke on 12/11/03 03:05 AM

I've been asked to put together a demo of a db-backed, web-accessible bibliography. Before I sit down and start writing this, I thought I'd check to see if anybody's got something similar either finished or in the pipeline.

Here are some of the features needed:

  • import/export BibTeX files
  • output in HTML, PDF, Postscript
  • search by author, keyword, pub date, journal title, article title, category, etc.
  • assign papers to one or more categories
  • allow annotations
  • quality rating (possibly)

Suggestions for additional functionality are welcome (although not likely to make it into the demo).

Thanks,

Matt
Collapse
2: Re: BIbliography Package (response to 1)
Posted by Alfred Werner on 12/11/03 04:56 AM
FWIW there was just a thread on generating PDF files under aolserver on the aolserver list - archives probably reachable from www.aolserver.com
Collapse
3: Re: BIbliography Package (response to 1)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 12/11/03 06:05 AM
I have been thinking about a package like this as a research tool for .LRN users. It is on my 2004 list, look forward to the demo. 😊

Would like to see community reference sharing and automatic import from reference databases: Medline, Ovid, etc.

You might want to look at Peter's "Bookmarks" package... hacking on bookmarks might be a cheap way to get a demo up very quickly if you are interested in selling someone on the idea of using OpenACS.

Here are some interesting links I have run across thinking about the problem:

Medlinefetch: Allows you to retrieve one entry at a time from the MEDLINE literature reference database: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/cgi-bin/medlinefetch

OpenBQS: a query and retrieval interface to the bibliographic repositories using SOAP protocol.
http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/openBQS/

Also it is worth looking at the tools that are out there:
Reference Manager, Endnote, etc.

Good luck.

Collapse
4: Re: BIbliography Package (response to 1)
Posted by Jade Rubick on 12/12/03 06:43 PM
If possible, the quality ratings could be a part of a general-ratings package on any acs object 😊
Collapse
5: Re: BIbliography Package (response to 1)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 01/11/04 12:42 PM
Just ran across this:

http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/bib/openbib.html#haystack

(Open standards and software for bibliographies and cataloging)

Hope the demo went well.

Collapse
6: Re: BIbliography Package (response to 5)
Posted by Alfred Essa on 01/13/04 06:56 PM
We did some work in this area awhile back as part of a "research" module for .LRN. The code is gathering dust in is incomplete. We are going to revive it after .LRN v2.0 is released. We are interested in working with the community on this.
Collapse
7: Re: BIbliography Package (response to 1)
Posted by Helge Wilker on 01/14/04 01:05 PM
I built a "Bookshelf" package way back in ACS 3.x days. It saw primary use in personal (single-user) bibliography management, but I certainly wanted to extend that to multi-user functionality. It did have BibTeX output and categorization!

I would be interested in working on this. I could dig out the old code, but it is probably ugly...

Cheers,
Helge

Collapse
8: Re: BIbliography Package (response to 1)
Posted by Matthew Burke on 01/15/04 02:25 AM
Well here we are at the end of winter break and I'm less than 1/3 of the way down my to-do list....

Eduardo Pérez Ureta sent me some code he had worked on and I've been glancing at refdb (mostly for schema thoughts).

As soon as the chaos of the first week or two of the semester dies down, I intend to really get into this.  If anybody who has mentioned they have dusty code lying around would be willing to let me take a peek, I'd appreciate it.

Collapse
9: Re: BIbliography Package (response to 1)
Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 01/19/04 02:25 PM
Maybe you could use parts of Lars's Bookshelf package.

Greetings,
Nima

Collapse
10: Re: BIbliography Package (response to 1)
Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 01/19/04 02:54 PM
One suggestion:

Since many sources are available online it would be great if the bibliography could be linked to the source to allow full text search and annotation.

I wrote a library in java using lucene that accepts a url or a file from local disk and does two things

1) make a copy of the source file for later use in case the link is broken in future

2) extracts the text and store it in a database for full text search (supporting ps, pdf, doc, html, txt) to return a rated hit list containing the relevant paragraphs of the source and a bibtex export feature (not finished yet).

This would be a very handy feature for your package.

A very powerful site is http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/ you might know. But as far as I understood it searches only abstracts and keywords but serves the original file as well.

Greetings,
Nima