[WEB4LIB] Webcite - An Experimental MLA Citation Generator

[Jul,Erik]

	RJT (name?) writes: 

	> Announcing Webcite, an experimental MLA-style citation generator

Interesting.

At the recent 6th Dublin Core Workshop earlier this week in Washington,
D.C., there was some discussion related to transforming metadata into
citiations.  Based on evidence presented by a representative from John Wiley
and Sons, scholarly journal publications contain 20 citations on average.
With 1 million scholarly journal articles published annually, that's 20
million citations in that body of publications alone.

What is probably most desirable would be the ability to submit metadata
(whether Dublin Core or other formats) to a process that would output
citations in various user-selected citation styles.  Such magic is difficult
to achieve and is subject to all of the vicissitudes of the "garbage in,
garbage out" maxim.  In other words, if the metadata does not contain
sufficient information or if the form of entry varies or suffers from
mistakes, then the citation will be at least as bad as the metadata itself.
But that's true today.

--Erik

Erik Jul
jul at oclc.org