GIS.org.nz

In an effort to ease the sharing of GIS references and publications, we have added some web-based bibliography software to the website. We are currently testing this through the addition of references obtained during the production of the GIS and Emergency Management Guidelines.

The key reason to take this approach is to move to a data format that is appropriate for storing bibliographic reference information. BibTeX is a long-standing and suitable format that can be used to store this information. The web-based library will act as the central repository, but it is easy to export some or all of the references in BibTeX format to install in bibliographic software that can be used on your computer.

For more information about BibTeX - please see the Wikipedia article on BibTeX.

Recommended Desktop Software

I have used two different open source packages for managing BibTeX files on my PC, and can recommend both of them. The descriptions below are copied directly from their websites.

• JabRef reference manager - JabRef is an open source bibliography reference manager. The native file format used by JabRef is BibTeX, the standard LaTeX bibliography format. JabRef runs on the Java VM (version 1.4.2 or greater), and should work equally well on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
• BibDesk - BibDesk is a graphical BibTeX-bibliography manager for Mac OS X. BibDesk is designed to help organize and use bibliographic databases in BibTeX .bib format. In addition to manual typing, BibDesk lets you drag & drop or cut & paste .bib files into the bibliographic database and automatically opens files downloaded from PubMed. BibDesk also keeps track of electronic copies of literature on your computer and allows for searching your database through several keys.

Web Software

I have installed the open source Aigaion software package on the webserver to provide the main database of bibliographic references.