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Comments on Sanford Porter's Suggested Bibliography Standards

In the following comments, I sometimes make a distinction
between "industry standards," which I assume you hope all
Endnote users and perhaps other bibliography software users would
share, and "library standards," which would apply to a single
library, such as yours on ant literature.

>2.      Reference types should generally be limited to 5-6
>types. The five styles I use are:  Journal, Book, Book Section,
>Thesis/Dissertation, and Report.

I am not sure I understand the logic behind this.  The purpose
of multiple reference types is to accommodate the unique
treatment of various fields in different styles, isn't it?  Is
your reasoning to require manual editing for those styles that
are used less commonly?  Consider that someone in a field like
musicology, for example, works extensively with recordings and
reviews.  Of what benefit is it to you not to have standardized
reference types for recordings and reviews?  Perhaps
your particular library could support only certain reference
types.  But as a standard across fields, it seems better to me
to set proper guidelines that serve wider needs.  In any case, the
Report type is a very useful suggestion for accommodating a
library's special cases.

>4.      Translations of foreign titles should be placed in the
>abstract field preceded by a double equal sign (==) and
>terminated with a double period..

Again, wouldn't a "Translated Title" field be preferable to
forced editing?  To be honest, I really don't understand
what you mean by "it would require novice users to modify
the reference types fields to avoid losing the data."
Also, it seems to me that search and replace characters like
"==" or ".." should be library standards and not industry
standards.  You just don't know what characters are used in
references in various fields of study.  (Don't you ever see
"..." used to indicate ellipsis in long titles?)  Perhaps what
should be universal is a "specifications record(s)" at the
beginning of each library that indicates any character
replacements.

>8.      Do not...capitalize the first letter of each word in
>the title.

Ouch!  I have never in my life used a style that presents
titles in this way.  Again, shouldn't this be a library standard
and not an industry standard.

>10.     New citations should be initially added to a separate
>RAdd-NewS file after the initial database is established.  Use
>of add-new files simplifies sharing new data with other
>databases andgreatly reduces the size of update files.

Please say more about this.  Does one site maintain the master
library on ant literature, and other sites/users contribute to it
by submitting add-new files?  As the host, you would check the
completeness and accuracy of references, and also check for
duplicates in the master library?  Then you would merge the
add-new files into the master library, and issues a new
"release" of the library?  Is this the way it should work?

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I am eager to see a discussion on this topic.

............................
. John Bealle              .
. 370 Howell Avenue #1     .
. Cincinnati OH 45220-2015 .
. uceng!cccbbs!john.bealle .
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