Bibliographic Software and the Electronic Library

The delivery of information in electronic form and the advent of huge databases on CD-ROM has posed a problem: how do we search, track, and record all this data? Bibliographic software has proliferated in the last few years to help us. This short but excellent survey of the field offers a guide to the principles, and to what is available. 

It is sensibly split into three sections. The first presents a description of what bibliographic software can do. The second offers five contrasting case studies on selection, use, and evaluation in academic and research institutions - comparing programmes such as ProCite, EndNote Plus, and Papyrus, and giving the reasons for the particular choice in each case. Interestingly, ease of installation and use came out high in most people's requirements.


The third section deals with the legal implications of downloading records - the usual problems of copyright, 'fair dealing' and the efforts of the 1992 EC directive to deal with them. There are also appendices giving contact addresses of suppliers (complete with Email addresses and telephone numbers), a suggested list of criteria for evaluating this type of software, and a good bibliography which has very sensibly been limited to items published since 1991. 

There are lots of acronyms to contend with - DBMS (database management system) SQL (structured query language) - but I suspect that we're all used to this phenomenon by now. This is a book for specialists (librarians, data managers, information scientists) but it presents an excellently succinct review of a branch of IT which is becoming increasingly important for any serious research.