Thanks Millie, Lesley and Jeremy for your suggestions. Much appreciated.

Millie, I'm still firming up the book proposal but I can say that it will be
different from my previous books. This one will be an academic study based
on research I hope to get some funding for. More when things are clearer!

Best

sue


> From: Millie Niss <[log in to unmask]>

> Subject: Re: [WDL] Advice re collecting bibliographical information
> 
> 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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