SARDS online - WOW!

[Birgit Kellner]

Timothy C. Cahill schrieb:
> Indologists,
>
>    We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Professor Slaje and his 
> colleagues for this impressive undertaking. A quick look at the list 
> of Abbreviations will show how useful this tool will be!
>
>
Indeed, the usefulness of this tool is enormous, as should be, and will 
be, our gratitude!

One issue, however, springs to mind for the regular user of 
bibliographical databases: the help page of SARDS2 describes how one can 
copy entries to word processing software, which basically amounts to 
copying strings of letters through copy-and-paste. This seems to be the 
only form of data export that is currently envisaged.

How about export to bibliographical tools like Endnote, via a Z39.50 
gateway? Or how about (more or less) standardized bibliographical export 
formats like BibTeX or TEI's XML structure? Are these being envisaged as 
potential future additions?

Implementing more sophisticated import/export possibilities, or even 
devising special application programming interfaces (API) which allow 
for combining individual bibliographical databases into meta search 
engines, would increase the utility of SARDS2 even further - especially 
since people will probably feel more inclined to suggest additions to 
the database and point out possible lacunae if for their input they 
actually get data in return that widespread bibliographical software can 
readily process. Well, speaking for myself, I most certainly would! 
SARDS itself could also profit from such export/import facilities 
because they would also facilitate data import into the SARDS database 
(with some post-processing to accommodate, for instance, customised 
keywording schemes).

- Just some food for thought.

Once more: thanks to Walter Slaje (and especially to Balthasar Pohlus 
:-)) for this wonderful resource.

Birgit Kellner