A definite lack of standards for academic metadata

To get an idea of why libraries and publishers need to work on standardising their search interfaces, publishing and metadata formats, you just have to look at the newest version of Endnote (a reference manager and bibliography formatting tool) [direct download link for the OS X trial version, but I don't recommend it]. This 150MB monster comes with:

  • 174 Word templates for preparing manuscripts for different journals
  • 480 filters for importing citation metadata from different sources
  • 561 connection files, for connecting to search services
  • and 1,383 output styles for formatting bibliographies for different journals
It could be as simple as a DocBook template for manuscripts (the journals would maintain their own XSLT file for bibliography formatting), an RDF parser for metadata import and an SRU search interface for searching.
October 19, 2005

Comments

I should probably admit that there's a lot of duplication in there, as there'll be a bunch of journals from the same publisher that use the same style or template but have individual files in Endnote. Still, there is a lot of unnecessary variation and it's all extra work for people who want to submit a paper or import/export citations.

Posted by: alf on October 20, 2005 7:22 PM

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