Word 2007 and the bibliographic processing future

There is an opportunity for the library and scholarly community to work with the various word processor builders to get to some common standards.

The main players that I'm aware of being Word 2007 and OpenOffice.

Jennifer Michelstein of Microsoft has the (mis)fortune of starting her MS blogging career with the posting [Word 2007] Academic features: citation & bibliography tools.

There's some nice stuff, but I have two concerns:

1. The focus is on building your Master List inside of Word.  Yes, you can share lists, but I don't want Word to be the citation master at all

Once a source is created, it lives in two places: your Master List and your Current List. The Master List is the database of all sources ever created. The Current List includes all of the sources that will be used in the current document.

The purpose of the Master List is to save you from re-typing and re-entering information about sources that you commonly use. For example, if you are a Shakespeare scholar and always cite the same five Shakespearean references, you can just select these sources in your Master List and click Copy to add them to your Current List. Now you can cite them throughout your document.

Maybe Connotea is my "master list", or EndNote, or Bookends.  You know, separation of concerns?  Let my bibliographic software be the master of citation management.  Make Word the master of communicating with all major citation repositories, whether local on my machine, or out on the web.

2. They will talk to libraries... somehow.  With a software development kit (SDK) that doesn't exist yet.  Um, how about we get that kit, immediately?

we are building a platform on the Research and Reference pane, to enable connecting to a library database and importing metadata about sources. We’ll publish an SDK so that Microsoft or any 3rd party data provider can build a service that fits nicely into our Bibliography tools. This project is underway, but the functionality isn’t available externally in Beta2. This sounds like a topic better handled in its own post.

darcusblog (Bruce D'Arcus, of the OpenOffice Bibliographic Project) has written extensively (and critically) about the current state of the art in citation management in Word 2007

via Dan on eScience

Comments

[Bruce]

I agree on separation of concerns, and that MS's view of this flawed. It seems to me they have talked to too many BibTeX uses, who are used to working with small, flat, files. Even little things like how they idenfify references (and thus link citations with their data) are based on a fairly parochial understanding of where reference management is these days (the web). Rather than do something forward-looking like use uris, they just use dumb natural langauge strings.

But, I do think that citation coding, editing, and formatting ought to be the domain of the word-processor, and not outboard citation applications.

Where we really need to get to is the place where three users -- each using a different word processor and bibliographic database application -- can effectively collorate; where their citations not only correctly display, but remain dynamically-updated.

Right now, that would be impossible. But standardized citation coding and source data in file formats (Open XML and OpenDocument), plus say, a standard XML styling langauge (like CSL) would make this fairly easy.

Out-of-box support for library-based communications standards (the ZOOM API, and the related z39.50, SRU/SRW protocols) would solve the plug-in question.