Re: Pre-installation RefDB questions

On Sep 5, 2004, at 8:14 AM, Jason White wrote:

> On the other hand, I am considering RefDB nevertheless, as it supports 
> importation of Marc records and I can probably gain access to the 
> libraries I use via z39.50. Yes, I am lazy and would rather not retype 
> the bibliographic details of the books I read.

This makes sense.

Note that there is a newer XML-based web services analog to z39.50 
called SRW.  The LoC SRW gateway serves up MODS records, which Markus 
is working on supporting. It would be nice if people working on web 
interfaces for RefDB would look into SRW support.  There are interfaces 
for Python, Java, and C/C++.

> Journal articles will have to be entered manually, though.

Note that a lot of article databases export to RIS.

> I am writing my documents in LaTeX. The main alternative to RefDB I
> can think of would be Bibtex files, which I expect would have to be
> maintained manually unless there is a Marc -> Bibtex converter around.
> I also happen to have MySQL installed for other reasons.
>
> So, do you think RefDB is the best solution for these purposes? Does
> it integrate well with LaTeX?

Depends what your needs are (what field you are in, what material you 
need to store and cite, whether you always intend to stay with LaTeX, 
need unicode support, etc.).  Care to elaborate?

Bruce

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