Comments on: Airpower: a bibliography of British aviation history

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:57:25 +0000

A good point. Though it really has the same problems as crowdsourcing the RHS bibliography, but on a smaller scale, which perhaps makes all the difference if there are enthusiastic maintainers. There are still issues to do with completeness and uptodateness and who owns the resources (maybe there needs to be a GPL-type viral license for data, to make sure it’s always going to be free). But with a less ambitious scope these might be more manageable. And if a number of such databases sprung up, there’d probably be a way to tie them in to a metadatabase anyway … Just speculating wildly!

By: Gavin

Gavin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:15:49 +0000

This looks fantastic. I wouldn’t say it was inadequate at all. I think specialist things like this are the way to go. I agree with Sharon Howard that crowdsourcing can never produce anything like the RHS Bibliography, but I also think we don’t need it to. Nobody ever actually needs the whole of the database, only a subset of the records, and we all know other people who need a similar subset. If everyone ends up getting what they need then it doesn’t matter if there isn’t one central database that has everything.

Now I’m wondering how easy it would be to make a mashup that would automatically sync WIKINDX with a Zotero group…

By: Ricardo Reis

Ricardo Reis — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:45:01 +0000

give it a try ;)

http://jabref.sourceforge.net

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 07:23:06 +0000

Ricardo:

I’ve heard of it but not used it — I use BibDesk to manage my BibTeX references, which is very slick but OS X-only, unfortunately.

Ross:

I certainly have no objections to it being about more than just bombing! That’s just what my bibliographic collection looks like. It could be opened up to post-1945 or even non-British stuff too, though I’m more hesitant about that. Depends on whether there is actually enough interest to make it worthwhile (though I’ve noticed quite a few hits from *.af.mil hosts already).

By: Ross Mahoney

Ross Mahoney — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:40:38 +0000

Brett this looks good. I think it should be opened out to all aspects of air power history, but then again I would. I think if you expanded it and opened to a few dedicated people willing to add to it there would be people out there that would use it. Air power history is still an expanding area and trying to collate a useful bibliography would be a great aid to those of us in that area.

By: Ricardo Reis

Ricardo Reis — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:08:41 +0000

Do you know

jabref ?