Dear Martha (and
other list members),
I very much enjoyed
reading this and thought it explained many of the concepts rather well.
It's clear the point about the DB and Document GUIs, and that makes sense.
I have some comments and questions on the proposal.
First, I take it
from the design docs that we propose, in phase one, to only allow access to
OoBib from within OoWriter. I would like to urge that we rethink that
decision and somehow allow the database GUI to be opened standalone. I
have two main reasons for this:
1) I personally very often work with the database of my thesis notes without any
reference document in mind, and it wouldn't make sense to me to have to open a
document (which I won't use) to get access to those notes. Also because
I'm paranoid about my notes, I'd like to be SURE they will be there for me if I
have to use another word-processor. I really don't like the feeling of
lock-in this proposal gives me.
2) EndNote and the other bibliographic programs are rather expensive - about �70
now ($135) student prices at my institution. One of my reasons for wanting
to help out on this project is to provide an alternative in terms of price - but
many people can't switch word processors because of institutional reasons (like,
we are barred from installing programs), so it would be nice to be able to give
them something they can use. I bet the IS people would consider an
alternate bib program before they would switch from Word. Especially if we
can add an IMPORT function, which I didn't see anywhere.
Second, in the
Statements of Prupose (p7), we have "Manage retrieved result sets and BibDBs
containing information items." I didn't find "Manage" as a key term that
was defined, and I would like to know what "managing" entails. Maybe this
is clear to others, I just didn't know.
In the document GUI
"style" element (p9), we say "A style must be selected before the first
insertion is made." I think we should have a default style, and the user
should then be able to change the style in the document -- in other words,
styles shouldn't be fixed for a particular document. I assume this is
somewhere, but I didn't read it and that's quite important to
me.
Regarding the
"private information" debate (p13): I don't like the idea somehow of their being
a separate file, and the files having to be in the same directory, and all this
stuff. I agree with Bruce (I think it was) that I have lots of stuff
I would like to remain private (what I think of my supervisor's writing, for
example). I would rather see it like this, though: I think the BibDB
should contain ALL the information, and that there should be a default setting
about what subset is included as the "travelling library" (to borrow an EndNote
term) with the document. The travelling library contents should be able to
be changed by the author of the document, and the travelling library ought to be
able to be exported into a proper BibDB by the reader of the document.
Then we don't have two documents needing to be in the same place at the same
time, or any of that stuff: we just have a proper-sized subset that travels with
the document and is under the original document author's control. Is that
a possible solution?
BibDB (p14) - "a
major issues is whether a document can contain insertions from more than one
BibDB" Yes, please!!!! I have a range of databases more or less
categorised by subject (sort of ), and I would like to be able to access them
all, not to have to go through some cumbersome cut-and-paste process to be able
to insert a reference I already have.
Regarding indexes
(p15) "Will OOoBib queries allow the use of any type of controlled
vocabular(ies?), such as LCSH or MeSH?" Can we arrange it so that we have
a default type of search, but that we can make some type of configurable search
interface so that particular sources can have different types of controlled or
uncontrolled searches? For example, we could define a generic
"bibliographic database" search which included author, title, date, and subject,
but eliminate subject from databases that don't work that way? This would
allow people with specialised databases - let's say chemical engineers - to put
in a field for chemical formulae in their specialised molecule database (don't
laugh, I read a lot about search engines as that's my topic of PhD research, and
there are indeed such databases). This would also allow for a more modular
way of extending the database.
Thanks Martha for an
excellent document.
Elizabeth
