🚀 go-pugleaf

  It seems to me that Mr. Valentine's efforts in setting up a place from
which
people can download journal styles are ill-served by some of the posters
to
bit.listserv.endnote.  This is not a simple issue and Mr. Valentine's
hard work now
may have to be re-done by somebody if poor decisions are made at this
early stage.
We need to think harder and look further ahead.

  People should have some idea:
- how many journals there are
- how many journals there are in his or her field
- what proportion of journals currently share the same style
- what "interdisciplinary"  implies
...to make intelligent comments about how to set up directories,
particularly
on somebody else's system!
    
  It seems to me that what we all need is a database of journals that can
be indexed by subject matter, so that an interdisciplinary researcher can
request journals by field without the invidious ascpect of multiple
copies of
styles and style-variants.  One simple way do to this, compatible with
directorywise storage, is to use or emulate MacIntosh 7.x aliases, which
allow
one to make up sensible directories of pointers to master files that are
stored in
arbitrarily convenient locations.   I don't know how easy this is to do
in 
Mr. Valentine's environment.
  
  Certainly we can't imagine the functionality we want **eventually**,
but the 
functionality we need now is to request "download journals dealing with
these
topics" and "download these specific journals, whose topics I haven't
specified".
If the design is addressed in a bottom-up fashion, we're going to suffer
later.

  Let me close by requesting that postings to this newsgroup routinely
address
which platform (currently IBM-compatible vs Mac) the writer is using or
discussing.  Some of the .hqx, .sit, and other matters are bound to be
specific to one or the other kind of system and naive subscribers need to
know
the specifics.

Ron Larkin
Ronald P. Larkin, Illinois Natural History Survey
607 E. Peabody Drive, Champaign, IL 61820  USA
r-larkin@uiuc.edu (Ron Larkin)