Kaspaliste

[robinturner]

I have just installed kaspaliste, a literature database. Actually, I was just looking for a simple interface to BibTeX (pybliographic is broken for some reason) but got carried away.

Kaspaliste uses a database (postgresql) to store information about publications (in fact setting up the database was a major pain, since I have no experience in postgresql, and little experience in any kind of database). This makes it much more powerful than BibTeX on its own - you can link bibliography entries to notes, cross-reference authors and publishers, and link to a file with the actual text, if you have it. Well, you can do the last one in theory, but I haven't managed to do it yet. There is even a link to your scanner/OCR programs, which would be great if I had a scanner at home.

In other words, I'm not sure if kaspaliste is the bibliography tool I've always been looking for or a horrendous waste of time.

Comments

[trochee.livejournal.com]

Ooh.

In other words, I'm not sure if kaspaliste is the bibliography tool I've always been looking for or a horrendous waste of time.

Let me know. I've been building a .bib file and if there's a better way, I'm interested.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Having played around with it for a while now, I have the impression that it's fun (for werid people who like playing around with literature databases) but needs more work before it can be a productive tool for the busy academic.

The ability to link bibliographic entries to actual files is a plus, as is cross-referencing through notes (for example, you can easily pull out all entries that you have associated with a particular subject). For those with scanners, the ability to create an entry for an article then scan it in is nifty.

On the downside, it is rather fiddly, taking rather to long to create an entry for a publication (which involves separate entries for the author and publisher). I can see how this system makes sense in the long term, but it's a pain when you have to enter a lot of data from scratch. But the thing that makes it unusable for me at the moment is the way it handles @inbook, @incollection etc.: the cross-referencing system is giving me LaTeX errors when I insert citations into LyX.

I'm checking out other tools, so I'll post if I find anything useful.

[solri.livejournal.com]

You might want to try JabRef (http://jabref.sourceforge.net/), a Java-based front-end to BibTeX. I downloaded it yesterday, and so far, I am very impressed.