[WEB4LIB] Re: Citation creation code?

[Karen Coyle]

The "why" isn't all that hard to answer, I don't think. It's 
complicated, and actually difficult to do because of the great range of 
citation "standards" and the even greater range of formatting of 
bibliographic data that needs to be used for citations. One of the 
things we desperately need is a standard citation "markup" that can be 
used to generate the textual citations. As it is, every indexing 
database, every document type, uses different fields, and some of them 
use no markup of individual elements. So a citation like this:

<p class="IndentHanging">Alonso, Ana M. "The Effects of Truth: 
Re-Presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community." <i> 
Journal of Historical Sociology</i> 1, no. 1 (1988): 33&#8211;57.
</p>
in some other system might be presented as:

AU Alonso, Ana M
TI The Effects of Truth: etc
JO J of Hist Soc
VO 1
NO 1
DT 1988
PP 33-57

And in yet another would be:

<p> Alonso, Ana M. "The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of the Past 
and the Imagining of Community."  Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 
1 (1988): 33/57.
</p>

Making sense out of all of these in order to get them into a database is 
quite a chore. Then you have to store the data in such a way that you 
can derive any number of display formats. If nothing else we need a 
standard markup for data elements along with an identifier saying what 
format they think they are representing (APA, MLA, etc.). The big job 
that folks like Endnote do is that they have separate parsing routines 
for hundreds of different input formats.

kc

Drew, Bill wrote:

>I guess the answer to my original question is "no."  it looks like there
>is no open source for what I am asking. I wonder why. Another mutating
>conversation that is much more interesting than the original message. 
>
>Bill Drew
>
>
>
>  
>

-- 
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
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fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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