[bibliographica-users] Some ideas for Bibliographica

[Jonathan Gray]

Hi all,

For ages I've been meaning to jot down a few ideas about how we can
improve Bibliographica, particularly from the point of view of user
experience / user interface. Below are a few (pretty obvious) things
off the top of my head to get a thread started...

All the best,

Jonathan

## Adding items

It would be amazing to have some basic interface for ordinary,
non-technical users to add items to the system. For example a big
'add' section somewhere obvious on the main menu which would take you
to a 'new item' page (a bit like the 'new package page' on CKAN).

As I understand one of the virtues of the existing system is that it
does not require a whole bunch of mandatory fields, but users can add
whatever fields they feel like/have available. Hence it could be
interesting to experiment with something like the Google Forms
interface, where you can click '+' to add a new field, and choose what
field you want to add using a drop-down menu or autocomplete (or both,
or something else?).

## Creating lists

I guess this could start with something like the CKAN 'groups', where
you have a basic interface to create arbitrary lists of items. I'm not
sure as to the best way to do this, but one could have something like:

  (i) an 'add to list' option for each item
  (ii) a checkbox and an 'add to list' option for any page where items
are listed (a bit like the Googlemail interface for labelling
messages)
  (iii) an 'add item' option on any list page, where you can either
search for an existing item or add a new one yourself

The lists would consist of:

  * a number of items
  * a title
  * a description
  * a URL
  * permissions status: public / private / shared with X, Y, Z

## Exporting lists / queries

One of the big things I hoped Bibliographica could do would be to
export a list of publications in a bunch of different ways (from LaTeX
to plain text/csv to various standard bibliographic data formats). In
an ideal world the user could even define templates to specify how the
data was exported, e.g. which fields, how it is formatted, etc.

A few use cases for things that I imagine users could want to do with
the exported lists:

  * add directly to an print publication (a normal document, from
.doc, to .odt, to LaTeX, to other fancier print formats)
  * import to some bibliographic data software (from library catalogue
software to personal bibliographic records software)
  * import to some other instance of Bibliographica
  * import data to other web services (like Library Thing, citation
sharing services, ...)
  * publish on personal/institutional website (e.g. list of things
that I've published, first year undergraduate reading list, list of
publications on topic X, ...)

## Importing data

It would be great to have some way of importing data in some standard
bibliographic data formats. This would include data from other
instances of Bibliographica.

## User pages

Ideally one would be able to create a user page with a basic profile
and links to any (public) lists they had created, and possibly any
recent edits they had made to any items.

## Deploying instances of Bibliographica

This is a *big* ask, but it would be *amazing* if eventually one could
deploy instances of Bibliographica, a bit like one can currently
deploy instances of Wordpress. E.g. one could request
[name].bibliographica.org, or one could run a copy of the software at
some arbitrary URL. So we could easily have things like:

bibliography.jonathangray.org
folktales.ed.ac.uk
kant.hu-berlin.de
etc

Guess this is less a UI/UX thing and more a long term wish! ;-)

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg