[ILUG] Reference database

[Marek McGann]

Hi Kevin,

I'd say look closely at Zotero. It's in very active development, and the 
features coming down the line are very tasty indeed.

On Thursday 08 January 2009 10:23:49 Kevin Philp wrote:
> 1. Must work on our standard  Ubuntu/OpenOffice desktop

It's a Firefox extension, so no problems there.

> 2. Prefer it was available over the network via MySQL. If MySQL is not
> an option than we prefer it was shared via another route.

Timing a tricky thing here - how soon do you want it deployed? Zotero 1.0.9 
uses a mysqlite backend I think, but is really only designed for single-user 
use. 1.5 is still in alpha, but the beta is due Any Day Now and includes 
syncing from multiple computers. Might be tricky from multiple users, not 
sure. If you really know your MySQL maybe you could hack something together 
though?

The proposed 2.0 has a set of server-based capabilities, but given that 1.5 
was originally due to be released last July, you might not want to hold out 
for this.

> 3. Prefer that it utilises the ability to extract references from web
> pages directly.

Zotero does this, and generally does it very well, from a wide range of 
sources. (Academic sources have more reliable info than the likes of Amazon.)

> 4. The lab people have suggested Zotero or Bibus as options.

I've used both and Zotero wins without question, I can't rate it highly 
enough. I'm just a single user, though, and your group needs will probably end 
up being the deciding factor.

Cheers,

Marek.

-- 

Lecturer

Department of Psychology,
Mary Immaculate College,
University of Limerick,
Ireland.

tel.: +353-61-204326
http://www.mic.ul.ie/psychology/Marek.htm