This post is a open draft! It might be updated at any time... But was last updated on at .
The online version of the SIL Bibliography contains a subset of over 29,000 citations from the more than 40,000 publications representing 75 years of SIL International's language research in over 2,700 languages.
Finding Resources through SIL.org's (as of 2 August 2012) Bibliography can be a challenge at times - Maybe even a time-wasting endeavor. Time wasting because it might not be very useful to consult the online Bibliography.
The challenging aspect which affects usefulness is primarily three fold:
Items known by SIL to have been created by SIL staff may or may not be listed. (The on-line Bibliography is a sub-set.)
Items listed in the Bibilography may or may not have digitally accessible resources.
Items created by SIL staff may or may not be in the bibliography because they have not been submitted to the Language and Culture Archive (managing division of the SIL Bibliography).
This is an experimental use of Mendeley's API to present a bibliography of materials used in the Meꞌphaa language documentation project.There are are several limitations to the WordPress plugin because it does not bring over all the reference types. This is partly a limitation of Mendeley's API and partly a limitation of the reference types they support in their application. The WordPress plugin ignores that some references do not have the same parts in their citations. Some form of CSL should be used in the plugin. More about Citation Style Language.
One other thing that I have noticed is that when there is a URL which ends in a .pdf the plugin re-codes the link name to "pdf". This is the advertised behavior. However, when there is more than one URL, they all say "url" rather than what is the last part of the URI. Look at this example from above:
Steven Egland, Doris Bartholomew, Saúl Cruz Ramos (1978) La inteligibilidad interdialectal de las lenguas indígenas de México: Resultado de algunos sondeos, Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, p. 58-59, Mexico City: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, url, url
One of the most popular Citation Management software applications among academics is the application Endnote. Endnote has a long history is published by a reputable company, and has some pretty cool features. I use it (version X4) primarily because it is the only citation softwareThere is other citation management software for OS X which claims integration with pages but none of these solutions are endorsed or supported by Apple. Some of the other applications which claim integration with Pages are:
Papers – This is according to Wikipedia, but I own and use Papers 1.9.7 and have not seen how to integrate it with Pages. (However, Papers2, released March 8th, 2011 does say that it supports citation integration with Pages.)
which integrates natively with the word processor Pages, by Apple, Inc. The software boasts a bit of flexibility and quite a few useful features. Some of the really useful features I use are below.
Customizing the output style of the bibliographies.There are several Linguistics Journals with style sheets on Endnote’s Website. Among them are:
Research Notes section in the citation’s file for creating an annotated bibliography.
Copy our all the selected works, so that they can be pasted as a bibliography in another document.
XML Output of Citation DataThe XML Support of Endnote has not been hailed as the greatest implementation of XML but there are tools out there to work with it.
However, regardless of how many good features I find and use in Endnote there are several things about it which irk me to no end. This is sort of a laundry list of these problematic areas.
Can not sort by resource type: For instance if I wanted to sort or create a smart list of all my Book references, or just Journal Articles. This can be done, one just has to create a smart list and then set Reference Type to Contains: “Book Section”. There is not a drop down list of reference types invoked by the user.
Can not sort by custom field: I think you can do this in the interface. Though it was not obvious on how to do it.
Endnote Display Fields
Can not view all the custom fields for a resource type across all resources. This seems to be limited to eight fileds in the sorting viewer at a time.
Can not view all entries without content in a specified field. This would be especially nice to create a smart list for this.
No exports of PDFs or exports of PDFs with .ris files.
There is no keyboard short-cut to bring up the Import function (or Export) under File Menu
Does not rename PDFs based on metadata of the resource. This is possible with Papers and Mendeley. The user has the option to rename the file based on things like Author, Date of publication, etc.
Can not create a smart list based on a constant in the Issue data part. I have Volume and Issue Data. Some of the citation data pulled in for some items has the issue set as 02, 03, etc. I want to be able to find all the issues which start with a zero so I can remove the zeros. Most stylesheets do not remove the zeros and also do not allow for them.
Items are not selectable based on Issue Data
Can not export PDFs with embedded metadata in the PDF.
Can not open the folder which contains a PDF included in an Endnote Library.
Endnote does not have a way to open the containing folder of a PDF
Close-up of the same menu.
Modifying Resource type does not accept |Language| Subject Language|
There is no guide in any of Endnote’s documentation for how to create an export style sheet. This is in the Help Menus I was expecting it on the producers website or in a book.
When editing an entry’s meta-data i.e. the author, or the title of a work, pressing TAB does not move the cursor to the next field. At least some times it does not continue to TAB. If I do a new entry as a Journal article, then it will tab till the issue field, but not beyond. It gets stuck.
There is no LAN collaboration or sharing feature for a local network solution.
There is no Cloud based collaborative solution.
There is no way to create a smart group based off of a subset of items in a normal group. i.e. I want to create a smart group of all the references with a PDF attached but I only want it to pull from the items in a particular group (or set of groups).
Endnote has no option for 'part of group' filter
There is no PDF Preview within the application. The existing Preview is for seeing the current citation in the selected citation style. (Preview of the output.) It would be helpful if there was also a preview pane for viewing the PDF or the attached file.
I have been looking for a way to create Posts with both Footnotes and a Bibliography section. I have wanted to make my post a little more professional looking, and let the information flow more easily with the way I write. What I have come to realize, is that Footnotes and Endnotes are different and function differently in respect to information processing. Traditionally, in print media Endnotes have occurred at the end of the article, whereas Footnotes have occurred at the end of the page on which the footnote is mentioned. This leads to a three way breakdown:
Footnotes
Endnotes
Bibliography
The purpose of footnotes is to facilitate quick information processing without breaking the flow of reading or information processing of the consumer of information. On web-based media, the end of the article and the end of the page is the same if pagination is not enabled. So this creates a sort of syncretism between Endnotes and Footnotes. However, the greater principal of quick reference to additional information still applies on the web. There are several strategies which have tried to fill this information processing nitch, these include things like:
Tooltips (The pop-up text which appears when your mouse cursor hovers over a link or some other text.)
Lightbox (The darker shading of the background and the high-lighting of the content in focus.)
Pop-up windows (which have been phased out of popular "good web design").
Information (Text) balloons (an example of this is WikipopWikipop is really a combination of the above mentioned effects above to create an inline experience for the user. But some web-sites have a similar effect which is dependent on the mouse hovering over the "trigger".).
With strategies for conveying information like Tooltips it is possible to meet the same information communication and information processing goals which were formerly achieved through footnotes. For Web-based information, which is intended to be consumed through a web medium Wiki-pop makes a lot of sense. However, if the goal is a good print out of content then footnotes are still needed, that is why I am using footnotes on this particular web presentationA solution which does both, tooltips or solutions like Wikipop, and footnotes when the content is printed, would be ideal. .
So here is a quick post on how I am doing it.
I am using two different "endnotes" plugins. One for the Bibliography section and the other for the Notes section.
Creating the Footnotes section:
To create the notes section I have elected to use a plugin called FootnotesEven though there are other options for Footnote Plugins. One other option I know about is FD-Footnotes. by Rob Miller. (Big surprise on the name of the plugin...) Footnotes allows for me to put what I want to show up as footnotes in <ref>something</ref>In order to get these tags to display inside of <code> and </code> tags I had to use HTML codes for the greater than sign, less than sign and slash. There is some additional good information about character encoding in HTML on Wikipedia. tags.
Additionally I can set a tag <reference /> anywhere in the post and produce a list of footnotes.
Creating the Bibliography:
To create the Bibliography Section I am using WP-Footnotes (in the WP plugins repository) by Simon Elvery. More information can be read about his plugin here. What this plugin allows me to do is to craft the citation of the item I want to cite. I have to figure out how I want to "code" the citation and then present the citation.
[1]Hand Code the contents of the citation as it is to appear in the bibliography here, between a set of double parentheses.
Do not forget a space after the citation text and the double closing parentheses.
This will produce a citation marker (a number) as a super script inline with the text. Like this :
And that will produce a citation in the bibliography section like the following:
Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 1998. Documentary and Descriptive Linguistics. Linguistics vol. 36:161-195. [PDF] [Accessed 24 Dec. 2010]
One interesting thing that occurs on the admin side of WordPress is that the plugin WP-Footnotes has an options page which shows up in the Settings menu, however what is interesting is that in that in the menu it is called Footnotes, not WP-Footnotes.
The options for WP-Footnotes really make it flexible, it is these setting which have allowed me to rename the section from Notes to Bibliography.
WP-Footnote Options
Final solution?
Is this my final solution? No. One thing I really don't like is that the bibliography is not orderd in alphabetical order of the last names, and then in order of the year of publication. Rather, citations are ordered in the order of appearance (as footnotes generally are). The plugin does not have any options for changing the order that thing appear in (though the headings on the ordered list can be changed). There is also no way to structure the data in the bibliography for reuse (even if it is just within this site), so each use of each citation must be hand-crafted with love. There are some other solutions which I am looking at integrating with this one but have not had time to really explore. One options is to integrate with Mendeley and aggregate bibliography data from a Mendeley collection. Another option is to create bibliographies as bibtex files and then use those to display the bibliography.
I am looking to re-skin Wikindex. I thought that I would add some CSS classes that would embed the meta-data in a manner that the citations could be picked up by Zotero quite easily. It seems to be a bit more difficult than I first anticipated. As a Microformat for citations is not yet been fully fleshed out. Obviously one way to go would be to embed everything in a span element as COinS does but that is not really what I am looking for. (Mostly because I don’t have a way to generate the Attributes in the span element automatically.) I have thought of using RDFa. But I still need to do some more research and see what can be gleaned in terms of which controlled vocabularies to use. I am hoping that this Lesson On RDFa will really help me out here. Finally I do need to know something about OAI so that once the Resources are put into Wikindex I can then tell OLAC what language they belong to.
