Any suggestions for library administration software please?

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Mike Marchywka wrote:
>Little Girl wrote:
>> 
>> This might be a temporary solution. It asks for a URL and
>> generates a citation from it:
>> 
>> https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_works_cited_electronic_sources.html
>>   
>I tried that on a web page without the info and it just hung.

Interesting.

>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.

The W3C standard requires a title element within the head element of a
web page, which is great for citations and would be easy enough to
identify, grab, and parse, but there's no requirement for paragraph
numbering elements, and without those, you'd have to get down to a
manual level in order to grab at least some types of citations. Even
if such a thing existed, lots of website administrators ignore the
standards and write invalid code, in which case you might not even
be able to fetch the title from the page source, let alone anything
else.

>For example, this is the result of a recent script run. I put
>"srcurl" on the clipboard, ran the script and it identified a way to
>get the bibtex ( or key-value pairs that specify the work ).
>Sometimes these are publisher site specific, other times available
>from a DOI and maybe others from html metadata or less likely pdf
>exif data. Some people on texhax maillist suggested that zotero etc
>can make a better choice when there are multiple source but the
>trick is to scrape the data when there is nothing explicity. Ideally
>every page, at least for news sites, would have bibtex cite buttons
>but for more commercial interest, see my archived posts on texhax, I
>noted that a bibliography could also be a bill-of-materials with one
>or two click buying for recipes or DIY projects or whatever.  

It sounds to me like you've got it figured out for sites that comply
with some sort of standard, whether that's presented as bibtex, DOI,
or some other form. I'm not sure what you can do about the sites that
don't provide something like that other than manually grabbing
whatever data is available. I suppose you could analyze the types of
text you'd be likely to see near such information and try to do a
sloppy grab of likely information that's flagged to let you know that
it needs to be cleaned up.

By the way, you got me all fired up about citations again, so I went
poking around last night and found MyBib. It's free and seems like it
will come in really handy for someone like me since I only need
citations in small quantities.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.