🚀 go-pugleaf

21 September 1993


Dear John Bealle:

        You made a good point about the distinction between
standards for an industry and a single bibliography.
The ideas I presented were primarily meant to be applied
to single bibliographies when useful.  However, some
ideas such as the double question mark for missing data
might be useful as a general standard.

2.  Limiting reference types to 5-6 varieties

        This suggestion was meant for a single bibliography
as a standard of convenience.  (Musicologists and
Journalists are also welcome to their own specialized
types).  The purpose of this proposal was to simplify
the cration of export styles and facilitate cross
platform compatibility with other bibliography programs.

        In my database 95% of the citations fit nicely into
four types (Journal, Book, Book Section, Thesis).  Three
percent or so don't fit into any type (mainly government
pubs.) and only 2% would fit into the other 9-10
possibilities.  I admit that I am slightly uncomfortable
with this proposal, but most journals do not have any
protocol for handling unusual reference types anyway.

        Placing all source information in the institution
field of the Report Reference Type is not ideal but some
citations just don't fit any style  >>>I wish EndNote
provided a Miscellaneous Type for this purpose.<<<

4.  Putting translated titles in abstract field.

        Again this is not ideal, but it is difficult to
explain to novice users who are already "scared" of a
new program how to turn on the "alternate title field"
in an off-the-shelf EndNote demo.  What I meant by
loosing data is that once a user opens and closes a
citation with a non-activated field, all data in the non-
active field is lost.  Furthermore, once this field is
on it clutters the view of the vast majority of
citations with titles that are not translated.    The
tags (== and ..) are contrivances that allow me to find
and move alternate titles in the event that this is
necessary.  <<You are right, the double period was a bad
idea.  Maybe a double bar (||) or double slash (//)
would be better.>>

Character Replacements

        You made a good suggestion about a specifications
or information record at the beginning of each library.
I use a series of such records (with === in the author
fields) to give credits, instructions and warnings.  One
warning I give is that all double quotes (") have been
replaced with an apostrophe ('). This was done to avoid
problems with exporting quote delimited records to Pro-
Cite (IBM) and dBase.  I also try to eliminate use of
tabs and hard returns in the abstracts because they can
cause similar export problems.

8.  Do not capitalize all words in title.

        OK this was a bit basic, but many novices do
attempt to capitalize words like they are found on the
title page of a book or manuscript.  Also, Current
Contents on Disk does this for some perverse reason.
(note: nouns in German titles do need to be capitalized)

10. Add-New Files  (sorry about typo in first message).

        Yes, I maintain the master copy of the database.
Use of add-new files allows me to cross compare new
submissions from contributing colleagues for duplicates
and completeness.
        Add-new files also allow me to send sequential
updates to users without sending the entire database.
(This is important because my database is 7.5 MB before
compression.)  Add-new files also allow users to update
customized bibliographies without losing their
customizations.

Sincerely,

Sanford Porter, Ph.D.
Research Entomologist

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