use cases

I would like to introduce a few "use cases" to inform our discussion of bibliographic databases:

Scenario 1: The Graduate Student

A graduate student is researching his dissertation. He needs to create an annotated bibliography of the works he has reviewed, as well as maintaining "private" locator information such as at which library and under what call number the work can be found. (So that he can quickly locate the document when he needs more information.)

Scenario 2: The Academic Researcher

A researcher is working on an academic article that she might submit to one or more journals. For the final submission, the bibliographic information, as well as the textual references to the bibliography, must be rendered in the journal's standard format. Obviously she would like to maintain the bibliographic information in a rendering-neutral format, so that she can easily generate submissions to an arbitrary journal.

Scenario 3: The Library Database

A library is updating its electronic catalog system. It needs to track full bibliographic information about the documents and items stored, as well as information regarding the availability of the item. In addition, the system should allow intelligent searches of the catalog, including information about the content of the document and medium in which it is published.

Scenario 4: The DTD Author

An information science specialist is creating a custom document type definition for a specific audience. Although the "body" of the DTD will contain a great deal of specialized information, she needs to include bibliographic information and references. Obviously, the DTD author, the final document authors, and application developers would prefer to leverage standardized bibliographical formats to avoid re-inventing the wheel.

existing standards

Typically, a number of systems might be used for the above scenarios:

• The student or researcher might use a BibTeX based system for tracking and rendering bibliographic data.
• The library will probably use a custom or packaged relational database system. There are probably standards and/or industry leaders here, particularly for inter-library loan systems.
• The DTD author might use a subset of one of the existing "book" DTDs, such as TEI (or TEI-Lite), CALS, etc., or might choose to "roll her own" markup language, probably based on one of the existing standards.

Rev. 2 July 1998 Rod Waldhoff rod@pg.net  ·  rwald@hotmail.com My root Tripod page: members.tripod.com/~rwald