Online Bibliography
Omar | 12. Dezember 2007
Ever been looking for a system to manage your list of literature? Well, only think about the time needed to write a thesis, a paper or any other publication. Most of the time, you’re searching for “that paper”, you’ve just read some months or even years ago.. Then, you’d like to have the documents that your predecessor used when he wrote his thesis. Or sometimes you could simply profit from the collection of papers your colleagues have prepared.
Well, since I began working at a university institute, I’ve had to collect quiet some papers and was looking for the best solution to archive them. One way would certainly be to print them out and put them into a folder. This has some disadvantages:
- The documents can’t be searched through easily.
- Ever tried to extract bibliography information from a paper? Well i have (for a friend) and think, it’s the most underpaid job one could do and one that could be substituted, when one collects that information right from the beginning..
- Ever heard of the coffee-cup-syndrome? Printed documents get dirty with time.
Just recently did I find out about Aigaion.
Both for individual researchers as for research groups or projects, it is of major importance to organize the literature one has read. A well organized bibliography is a powerful instrument. It speeds up the search for publications one has already read and supports the user in structuring information. Aigaion provides a bibliography management environment that supports a user in just this: Organizing and managing a complete bibliography, from small bibliographies to bibliographies for a complete research department.
The system makes it easy to collect and categorize published articles. The easiest way to import a document into the aigaion-system is to import the bibtex-code associated with the document. Then one can attach as many files as necessary and assign one of those files to be the main document.
Aigaion supports the export of bibtex-code for all documents, a specific category or a set of bookmarked documents. It also allows for basic user management and the linking of external references. It’s written in php and needs a mysql-database to run. So nearly any webhosting account or private computer can host the package.
The latest alpha-version (2.0) is not published yet (but i can confirm, that it works just fine). It can be obtained by writing an email to the project-maintainer: reidsma <overat> users <subdomainof> sourceforge.net. For a quick test of the system, you may either try the demo-application or you may download the latest stable version: Aigaion 1.3.4.
