Sue--
Eastgate http://www.eastgate.com/ (the company that made Storyspace) has a
product which they claim is good for collecting notes and bibliographic
materials and so forth. It's called Tinderbox, and is available (only) for
the Mac. I know nothing about it, so I am not endorsing it at all (and I
have heard negative things about Storyspace, so I might even be a little
suspicious), but it might be worth looking into.
It sounds like what you want to do is actually fairly straightforward but
very tedious (to do by hand, for example). If you program (like maybe in
Java or Visual Basic or some other mainly off-line language that can also
look on the web) it might not be that hard to create exactly the kind of
database you need...
Can Excel produce the formatting you need? If it can, that might actually
be a sensible choice. (There is also MS Access -- does this exist on
Mac? -- which almost certainly can do what you want but isn't as easy to
use.) What about Filemaker Pro?
What is the book to be about (or is it confidential as yet?)?
Millie
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sue Thomas" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2005 10:47 AM
Subject: [WDL] Advice re collecting bibliographical information
> I'm posting this query to the list and also to Tipmonkies
> http://www.tipmonkies.com/
>
> I'm just starting a big book project which is going to take me five years
> and will involve an extensive bibliography and an awful lot of footnotes.
> Worse, it will be a multimedia bibliography which so far is spreading
across
> bloglines, furl, and del.icio.us as well as all kinds of other websites
and
> print media.
>
> What I would like is some kind of template - online or offline - where I
can
> collect my growing multimedia bibliography in an orderly fashion, and in
> established format, MLA or whatever.
>
> An important function I'd like is one with fields which retain the correct
> formatting for each entry, i.e. Automatically generating apostrophes
around
> certain kinds of titles, or making them italic or underlined, etc. Doing
> that kind of formatting is the most tedious part of the job, so a record
> which only exports as plain text, for example, wouldn't be much help
because
> I want to be able to then paste references into footnotes and also
generate
> or paste the whole list into a Word doc when I need to - and keep the
> formatting at the same time. A tall order! But I always end up with
> references all over the place and this time I want to start off on the
right
> foot.
>
> I started creating this in Excel but realised it would be sensible to find
> out whether someone has already done it first - does anyone have any
ideas?
>
> oh, and I am Mac-based :)
>
> Thanks
> Sue
>
> **********
>
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