Chorus: Electronic Research: Biblioscape Review (Cont.)

Biblioscape (Windows) (Cont.)	Chorus « Electronic Research

Third, Biblioscape is geared towards researchers in medicine and other "hard" sciences. Almost none of the included import filters or output styles come from the world of social science or the humanities (although powerful filter and style editors are available to users ready to perform their own customizations). No attempt has yet been made to address the special needs of humanities scholars regarding foreign language characters (diacriticals) and the generation of citations in long and short forms within footnotes.

The market for bibliographical software is dominated today by two different types of products, exemplified by EndNote and ProCite. Except for its recent addition of direct import from remote databases via the internet, EndNote is a spartan product with a reputation for speed, reliability and support. ProCite and other products from Research Information Systems (RIS), a subsidiary of the giant Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), are more fully-featured than EndNote but suffer from overkill in the eyes of many users. Biblioscape is like ProCite in that it offers a vast selection of features, adding some that are completely new to the field. On the other hand, despite continued rough edges its interface is intelligent, efficient and sufficiently customizable that users need not feel overwhelmed. In comparison to EndNote (the program used by this reviewer) reliability is Biblioscape's major weak point, yet in terms of features, Biblioscape is the EndNote user's dream come true.

Standard Windows conveniences are exploited, including the use of toolbars, drag-and-drop, and the right mouse button.
Lists of bibliographic records are presented in an Explorer-style display. Fields are user-selectable; the user can choose between various iconic or list displays; sorting can be performed simply by clicking on the appropriate header bar; and references can be linked to one or more (virtual) folders.
Biblioscape's record-editing window permits users to browse forward or backward without closing and opening windows, either by pressing shortcut keys or using the convenient toolbar.
In addition to viewing the current list of records, users may choose to view other windows as well. A compact "preview pane" can display the currently selected record in WYSIWYG, using the current style format. Another pane can display either a tree view of database's virtual folders, or tools for searching and sorting references.
Biblioscape implements many other features long craved by EndNote users. These include not only "killer" capabilities like spell-checking and web publishing, but also more modest improvements: saved searches; automatic date-stamping of new or imported records; the possibility of adding fixed text during imports; database backups (either manual or automatic); global search-and-replace that is capable of converting all titles to a uniform case; and a facility for weeding out duplicate records at variable levels of "fuzziness."

Biblioscape's integration with the World Wide Web is unsurpassed (though again, be warned-not all features are trouble-free yet). The program can both import references from web-based bibliographical databases and library catalogs, and publish its own databases on the web. The "hot" import feature is designed to save users the tedium of first downloading references and then importing them. It works by clever integration with Microsoft's Internet Explorer: a single click permits Biblioscape users to "capture" and import displayed references. The advantage is that unlike other hot imports (such as that incorporated into EndNote), the service is not limited to sites complying with the Z39.50 protocol pioneered by the Library of Congress. The main disadvantage is that it is unsuitable for large downloads, because the information to be captured must first be displayed on screen.

Integrated web publishing is Biblioscape's most singular accomplishment. Until now, scholars wishing to share their personal bibliographical collections via the web had to buy an add-on product, such as RIS's Reference Web Poster, or export references from dedicated bibliography-managers like EndNote or ProCite to other database applications (such as Filemaker Pro) with web publishing capabilities. Biblioscape's built-in publishing capability will typically be utilized by users with an office PC permanently connected to the Internet. The PC must have web server software installed (Biblioscape recommends using a free offering from Microsoft). With the help of a few ready-made (and customizable) forms, the user is able to let any surfer browse a specified database. Users with authorization may add records or modify existing ones and may even post comments on a bulletin board. This not only turns the web into a convenient means of distributing references (e.g. to students), but also permits genuine collaboration among the members of research groups--whatever computing platform they use and whether they inhabit the same building or live on different continents.

The commercial versions of Biblioscape are also able to exchange files or communicate in real time with industrial-strength Windows or Unix SQL database applications (including Oracle and MS SQL server) across a local network or the web. In this way Biblioscape can serve as the portal to very large collections (several million records). The developer intends to extend this capability so that web publishing can also point to an SQL "back end" instead of a native Biblioscape database. Most users however will be more interested in being able to publish their bibliographies on dedicated web servers in preference to their own PCs. Since these servers are typically Unix-based, users going this route will have to give up on Biblioscape's built-in facilities for serving up its databases on the web.

In addition to SQL integration, several other benefits result from what may seem an arcane technical feature of Biblioscape, namely that underlying it is the Borland Database Engine (BDE). First, this enables extensive foreign-language support (e.g. this user was able to display and properly sort references typed in Hebrew). Second, Biblioscape easily permits multiple users to access and modify a shared database on a network server, protected by record-level locking.

For all these remarkable features, as I noted at the outset Biblioscape is still far from bug-free. The most significant area that still requires attention is word- processor integration. I found Biblioscape's facility for inserting citation markers in Word documents and then preparing formatted reference lists is erratic and unreliable. But once these and other problems are addressed, Biblioscape may well become the standard- setting application for bibliography management.