Any suggestions for library administration software please?

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Mike Marchywka wrote:
>Little Girl wrote:
>> Mike Marchywka wrote:  

>> >On a scientific page, it did produce the result but that
>> >format-specific stuff is a problem- it needs to return key-value
>> >pairs and let you do the formatting.  
 
>> Ah, okay. I don't know of anything that can do that off-hand. It
>> sounds to me that this would involve an HTML standard that website
>> administrators would have to adhere to so that you could reliably
>> identify and grab the correct information from each page.  

>Yeah, I think that is doomed. But, if you can find my posts on
>texhax at tug archives I think I included some notes on "BoMTeX" or
>adaptation to bibtex to make it more commercial but also useful for
>most web page types. I'm trying to move my bibtex script into c++
>for the logic ( still invoking bash from c++ for all the real work).

Okay, I found those. I get the impression, from what you're trying to
accomplish, that you're probably going to be stuck taking a teaspoon
to an ocean and will have to take it one site or one business or one
website administrator at a time. A possibility would be to contact
the W3C and make a wish for some new elements that website
administrators can use to make their pages citable in a consistent
way. I realize you can create any element you like nowadays (and I
love that dearly), but this would be about creating a standard that
people would be made aware of and encouraged to adhere to.

>One related idea though that came up in the latex discussion was
>the idea of making clipboards that had some notion of "where the heck
>the stuff came from." So, when you paste to the clipboard someone
>has source material to keep track of how to cite it.  No idea how you
>make that work but maybe for the next Ubuntu :)

Now that's an interesting idea. As far as I can see, no one has
invented such a thing yet. You would probably need to contact each
program's development team individually to see if they'd like to take
their code in that direction.

I can, however, imagine that it could be problematic. If you cite
something in file A in folder X and the clipboard program remembers
the source file and its location, that's fine as long as the source
file doesn't move and/or get renamed. If it gets renamed later, all
is lost unless you can grep likely locations for some of its
contents. If it gets moved, you might be able to find it by doing a
search for its file name. The clipboard program could be designed to
monitor the file system and keep an eye on its sources, updating
them when changes are made, but that would be resource-intensive and
might be considered an unwelcome intrusion by the user.

This is an interesting predicament all the way around.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.