[sword-devel] Bibtex for modules

[Peter von Kaehne]

On 13/01/11 16:57, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jan 2011, Peter von Kaehne <refdoc at gmx.net> wrote:
> 
>> Modules really should have bibtex or something similar in their conf
>> file. This would improve the use of our library for academic purposes.
> 
> Some design questions for you. (Always better to fix bug in design than in
> the debug or production phase. Standard software engineering procedures;
> the more time spent in design the less time in the debugger.)
> 
> a) How does the end user get the bibliographic citation out of the .conf
> file for a module?

Was explained in previous email.

But a) there is a method in libsword for getting conf entries (so
frontends can access this) and b) the conf files are there, public and
accessibly in your home directory, so anything/anyone can get it from
there without using a frontend.

> b) How does an end user refomat a specific citation from obtained from
> Sword converted to another format?

Absolutely any and every open source bibliographic software can handle
BibTeX - at least as import format, if not as native format. Most can
also export into other formats.

> c) Why not delegate the bibliographic information to the module provider?
> Chris Little mentioned in an email that it would be possible to generate
> the bibliographic information on the Crosswire server. Why not leave it
> there and the very few people who really need it can grab it from the
> server.

Why? To make it more complicated to access? 100-200 bytes added material
? Why should this not in the conf file?

> d) Why does any mention of Sword (or Crosswire) need to be made for those
> modules that have not been through some textual amendation process? In
> citing a book, paper, article, or other resource discovered online one
> doesn't say "found with Google", or "in a search result from Bing." The
> bibliographic information a scholar would require is author(s)/editor(s),
> year of publication , edition, place(s) of publication. In the main those
> are going to be the original publisher. Crosswire only needs be credited
> if copy-editing changes have been made to the text; I contend that
> claiming for marking up a module is unecessary.

Massive difference to Google, which links to content rather than
providing content Apart from that Greg has answered this. I think his
answer stands.

Peter
>