[okfn-discuss] Tools for collaboratively developing online bibliographic indexes

Jonathan Gray jonathan.gray at okfn.org
Mon Nov 30 21:20:49 UTC 2009


I currently have several ideas for projects for which I want to create
large, collaboratively maintained online bibliographies (or
bibliographic indexes/databases)...

I wonder if anyone has any ideas for any (open source) tools which
might be good for this? Or where I could ask?

A few notes on the kind of thing I am looking for:
  * There are quite a few static HTML bibliographies out there, but
I'd like to be able to do basic queries on my bibliographies, rather
than just viewing them as a list. E.g. organise by country of author,
by language of work, order works chronologically, order according to
whether 'primary' or 'secondary' material (this will probably be a
non-standard field!), and so on.
  * Not limited to books, but to articles, primary sources
(manuscripts), audiovisual material - as well as pointing to online
sources (especially public domain texts).
  * Ability to annotate bibliography (comments on works)...
  * Preferably using some kind of standard format for bibliographic
metadata - and (in an ideal world) flexibility to output records in
different formats (MLA, Harvard...)
  * Preferably I'd like to have some control over where these are
hosted (i.e. not using a proprietary/third party service).
  * In the short term this would be in English, and would contain
works from multiple languages, but over time support for being able to
translate material into multiple languages would be valuable.
  * Also (again in an ideal world!) I'd like to be able to pull out
dates associated with works and authors - which could be displayed on
a timeline (by country, say).

Any/all tips would be greatly appreciated!

-- 
Jonathan Gray

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




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