Request your thoughts on web-based bibliographies
As I wrote previously, I am taking Bibliography this semester.
Today (Wednesday) was the 1st day of classes, and since it was “actually” a Monday (don’t ask), and this is an on-campus class, the 1st day of Bibliography will meet next Wednesday, when Wednesday is truly Wednesday.
[Seriously! I'm not babbling; this makes perfect sense to those of us at UIUC. Or, at least we deal with it.]
I am taking it for full credit and, thus, 80% of my grade will be based on one of the following:
- “An annotated bibliography or a paper on a bibliographical topic” of “20-50 pages (or 10,000 words)” (Course Protocols).
- “Several [8] short papers or examinations on assigned topics or in assigned areas” (Course Protocols).
Personally, I lean to the 1st option. But I’d like some input as I may try and slightly co-opt the medium of expression.
When I wrote to Dr. Krummel for permission to take the course, I said my interests were in working on a bibliography of Dr. Richard Stivers’ writings or in compiling my working bibliography for my CAS project, which I hope to complete in the spring (the project, that is).
Seeing as I still have no real idea what I am doing for my project that presents a bit of a conundrum. I’d love to spend more time on Dr. Stivers’ stuff, but…. For one, I’m not so sure that is the best use of my time at the moment.
As most of you know, I read a lot of our literature and I do list it here with the occasional commentary. I, also, have recently migrated a fair amount out of EndNote into Zotero. [And I sure wish I hadn't lost the vast majority of what I had had in Zotero, but there's no use crying now. I do backup my Zotero database/export in a couple of ways now.]
Based on some conversation with my advisor, some of the previous bibliographies that I have done, some posts and comments that I’ve seen around the interwebs, etc. I think I’d like to try and do something with Zotero and my LIS readings. The question becomes, What?
Zotero has some big plans, some of which may be arriving this fall: Accessing your library from anywhere on the web, shared collections, and some other exciting things. But that is the future.
Note: I am not going to use the term webliography for a couple of reasons: I do not really care for it; my parsing of it means it’s about web resources only (or primarily); uh, oops, forgot the others. I will use the term bibliography to mean a collection of, and listing of those, resources in some meaningful order. In my case, the resources will primarily be items that would normally fall under the biblio- part of bibliography, that is, print books and articles, but will not be restricted to those.
What I’d like to hear from you all is some comments on the following [please feel free to consider the best of all possible worlds or/and keep our current state in mind]:
What purposes (if any) do bibliographies serve on the web? Is there one?
What form should web-based bibliographies take to support those purposes?
Should embedded COinS or some other OpenURL or similar technology be employed?
What would be the best way to present our literature in a web-based bibliography that might entice you to read some of it?
Would it work best for you divided by larger topic areas (Thesaurus construction, classification, cataloging, vocabularies, etc. [or something similar]), or by individual tags?
Feel to ask, and answer if you like, any other questions that you think may be important to the future of bibliographies on the web.
Theoretically, I ought to be able to output bibliographies by individual tags and I know I can by folder (topic areas). Some of the issues include inconsistent tagging, creating navigation for a large number of pages if I use tags, and multiple instances of many repeated items to be indexed by search engines, which will affect their rankings.
Also, which citation format do you prefer? [But only if you think you might use one of more of the bibliographies.] Zotero only outputs to a few right now, but more of those are coming, too.
I would really like to pursue this and see what can be done; unless I figure out my CAS project topic, but the chances of that happening quickly are slimmer than me. Besides creating some amount of bibliographies that I would be able to annotate in a better form that I generally do each week, I am figuring that I could write up the process of using Zotero to publish web-based bibliographies, what I learned in the process of pursuing this, create a stylesheet that would provide a good presentation of the bibliographies whether viewed on screen or printed, etc.
I will need to sell this to Dr. Krummel, I imagine. I would greatly appreciate any input that you can give me—either way—so that I can decide whether it is worth pursuing, and, if so, so that I may better sell the idea.
So, please, what do you think web-based bibliographies ought to be and become?
Thanks, in advance for all input.
This issue is really intriguing. I always tend to think along two axes with questions that involve something analog moving online: 1) how to take maximum advantage of the functionality of the network to enhance the character of the analog thing, and 2) how to go beyond the functionality of the analog form, or how to think of it in as new a way as possible. I’m not taking a class on bibliographies. I don’t even think UT offers such a course, so I am not anticipating that I’ll ever have the stage set for me to explore the subject like you will. I will be very interested to see what you come up with. Here are a few questions I would add to those you created above:
1) is a bibliography very different from a good search result on the web, and if so, how?
2) is it very different from someone’s (an academic’s) del.icio.us (or other social bookmarking tools, librarything, etc.) collected tags on a particular subject
3) can it include the best functionality of 1) and 2) above and add what’s different about it, assuming what’s different is also a positive quality we want to bring into the online environment
4) what can it do that goes further than 1) 2) or 3) and obviously, further than the bibliography on paper sitting in a file somewhere that has no capacity to lead to reading without serious time, money and effort on the part of the reader?
Speaking to that last point (and your question about how to get people to actually read what you have in your bibliography), if a resource I find described online does not link directly to the resource, a way to see it at least, or purchase it, the likelihood that I’ll pursue it drops pretty dramatically. True confessions: I consider it a burden to have to leave one browser window or one tab within a browser window and go to another (my library’s homepage) to repeat my search to access an article I found through a search, but that’s only available to subscribers, for example. Granted, I’m going to have to get over this to do really, really serious research on whatever topic I pick for my dissertation, but that’s a pretty narrow swath of all the reading I’ll do in my life. Most of it (including most of the rest of my academic reading) will be stuff I’ve found out about online and accessed online. Lots to read, so little time. If I can get it without burning fossil fuels, I prefer that. I’m starting to rant…
“Should embedded COinS or some other OpenURL or similar technology be employed?”
Yes!
Ok: in my ideal bibliography system:
You would be able to
* filter, search, and sort items by any metadata field.
*select any subset of the bibliography (including the whole thing)
*and do actions on the whole or your selection
Here are some actions I would want:
*download citations to your own collection (online or locally hosted on your own computer)
*mark the subset for later use in the online system
*search the full-text of all items in the subset. Results would show KWIC snippets and could generate subsets for further actions
*add all references to your collection (preserving field structure)
*use an associated “bibliography processor” to download all the associated items. Your processor would be able to authenticate for your library access and individual subscriptions. It would create a new subset of problem items, for manual inspection, which could easily be passed to other services (like ILL).
Other bibliography thoughts:
*free online resources and subscription resources would be distinguished by an icon
*a good bibliography should give a sense of the field–clustering and facets may help with this, and leveraging the structured data (e.g. by journal, tags/descriptors, etc.)
A few existing models:
*CiteULike (for collaborative uses, see for instance the MMORPG Studies Group
http://www.citeulike.org/group/MMORPGStudies
*Marcia Bates has some interesting bibliographies: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/bib-intro.html
*CiteSeer
It might be out of scope, but I’d like to see a review of the different kinds of ways people have formatted scholarly bibliographies on the web–from 1995-style single-user flat list, to collaborative list, to single-user cross-referenced list (or whatever). I think that would be an interesting piece of web history on its own.
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But for the meantime, I think SIMILE might help make a nice bibliography on the web.
Really curious to see how you proceed! I’m finding your “some things I read this week” postings interesting, though I wish it were easier to pull individual citations while retaining structure. Keep us posted!
I will be interested to see what you come up with too. I’ll answer your questions, but you’ll have to keep in mind that I am a Zotero Zealot. (I should get a badge!)
What purposes (if any) do bibliographies serve on the web? Is there one?
I think a bibliography would be like a delicious list, only better explained and annotated. Delicious limits how many characters you can use pretty severely. Plus, there’s the obvious advantage that you can include things that are not online- although, I think those items might need even MORE explanation, because a reader would really need to know a resource fits his or her purposes before going to the effort of tracking it down.
I definitely think there’s a use for online, detailed bibliographies, since what’s out there is pretty shallow. The result would have to be really easy to use in order to compete with social software.
What form should web-based bibliographies take to support those purposes?
I’m a little stumped here. Are there tools that already exist for this purpose? It seems like Cite u like or connotea might work. A WordPress installation that has been fiddled with might do the trick, especially if you could get the COinS to export correctly. Actually- this would be a great independent study program- create a custom wordpress installation or theme explicitly for building online bibliographies. I tried to do this once using Movable Type, but it was a failure.
Should embedded COinS or some other OpenURL or similar technology be employed?
Well, my answer is a great big YES. I’d like to see links that work as long as you’re in an institution that subscribes to the article – this would make an online bibliography very useful. This seems like it could be difficult- in the short term, I suppose one could link to Google Scholar, which usually does a pretty good job of getting the correct link for your institution. I need to educate myself more on open URLs.
What would be the best way to present our literature in a web-based bibliography that might entice you to read some of it?
Well, first, have a way to narrow the subject to something I’m interested in. Give me a way to aggregate, export, and comment on the information. Make it easy to scan.
Would it work best for you divided by larger topic areas (Thesaurus construction, classification, cataloging, vocabularies, etc. [or something similar]), or by individual tags?
Personally, I think larger topic areas. Tagging might be useful, too, though, because some items might fit in more than one category- often, though, if that’s the case, it’d also need a different description.
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I’m sure you can tell I’m new to all this stuff.
The class sounds really interesting! Wish I could take it…
1. What purposes (if any) do bibliographies serve on the web? Is there one?
I think there are a few purposes for web-based bibliographies. The first is the obvious–an electronic record. That seems to be the default “just because” for putting things on the web, so I’ll pass it buy with little explanation.
To provide easy access to an author’s works is the second reason for placing bibliographies online. There is a generation that doesn’t realize print bibliographies exist; hence the Internet increases accessibility and visibility.
But I think the ultimate purpose of a web-based bibliography is information dissemination. For instance, people know about C.S. Lewis and his voluminous writings. But many of them do not know about the writings of his closest friends in the group The Inklings. If they like Lewis, they may like these authors as well.
2. What form should web-based bibliographies take to support those purposes?
If the main point of the bibliography is to let people know what the author has written, the web-based format should be very simple in its initial format. The information seeker should encounter the most basic information: title, publication date, and publisher. From there, if the user is interested, he may proceed to more detailed information: full bibliographic record and annotation. (In my mind’s eye, I see the simple format with either a “more info” link, or an arrow indicating one can open hidden info. Something like that.)
3. Should embedded COinS or some other OpenURL or similar technology be employed?
Based on my brief scan of the introduction, yes.
4. What would be the best way to present our literature in a web-based bibliography that might entice you to read some of it?
You need to give the user a good reason to spend his time browsing your accumulated data, but the format will do more to encourage use than anything else. If a dedicated information seeker is looking for information on your subject, he’ll get to your bibliography one way or another. Whether or not he will use it depends on ease of use. HCI studies have proved this time and again: if the website is dull, the site will be ignored; if it is overloaded with bells and whistles, the site will be avoided. It’s a balancing act of providing enough navigational support without overwhelming the user with every minute detail available all at once.
5. Would it work best for you divided by larger topic areas (Thesaurus construction, classification, cataloging, vocabularies, etc. [or something similar]), or by individual tags?
Based on this question, I think I may have misunderstood the fourth question, so I’m not going to answer it completely. Personally, I like topic areas combined with tags as the “subheadings,” if you will.