[Air-l] concerns about new biblio programs

[Jeremy Malcolm]

Alex Halavais wrote:
> If you are going for staying power, and interoperability, it strikes
> me that any system that can import and export to BibTeX should work
> fine. In other words, the only systems you really have to be wary of
> are those that keep your data in a proprietary format, and it strikes
> me that open source products are less likely to go that route than
> many proprietary systems. Like with email clients, the danger of
> lock-in has more to do with how open the record system is than it does
> with how open the application itself is.

On that point, harking back to RefDB (http://refdb.sourceforge.net), it 
imports and exports BibTeX and in fact I use a BibTex manager (BibDesk) 
on Mac OS X as the front end to store my references rather than using 
RefDB's rather clunky command-line, Emacs-based or Web-based interfaces. 
The combination works well.

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm LLB (Hons) B Com
Internet and Open Source lawyer, IT consultant, actor
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