2004-08-29

exploring bibliographic data and workflow

My refdb is up and running. I hate the web interface, which is very oldschool - just an output mode of the regular client through cgi. Its functionality is also really crippled compared to the command line. I guess I'll be in the interactive client a lot, or throwing together some c# that sends shit to the client. I definitely don't have time to rewrite the client itself in c#.

Some claim to be working on prettier php frontends to this, which is promising. I'd really like to see open source stuff like this move away from php toward c#-mono.

I'm also pleased that others recognize the way things should be, and how dysfunctional the academic process is.

Finally, I'm pretty much convinced that refdb is the best solution currently available. And if I choose to move to something else later, I can always dump ris or bibtex out of it and import.

A geographer named Bruce D'Arcus is a name I keep running across, and it's neat that he is both an active scholar and deeply involved in other geeky stuff like this that matters too.

No comments: