Create Digitally Enhanced Bibliographies with Public Domain Databases. (Digital Librarianship)

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For this month's column, I chose a topic that has big potential for librarians who want to indulge in small-scale (but still very useful) digitization projects: Digitally enhancing existing individual bibliographies and bibliography collections on the Web can bring instant (OK, quasi-instant) gratification.

Try Enhancing Computer-Readable Bibliographies

Librarians and researchers have long appreciated the importance of subject bibliographies, recognizing that good bibliographies are essential resources for collection development (print or digital) and for research. There are tens of thousands of substantial bibliographies posted on the Web. Searches for them on Google and Allthe Web yield grossly inflated numbers (6 million and 8 million, respectively), because the results include zillions of tiny bibliographies at the ends of student papers. A large percentage of the hits merely discuss and try to explain how to create bibliographies according to the maddeningly nonstandard and often senseless, pseudo-academic bibliographic citation formats. (For perspective, the current version of EndNote supports more than 700 bibliographic citation formats dreamed up by publishers for manuscript submission.) Then again, many of the sources retrieved by the search engines are comprehensive, massive bibliographies of thousands of citations. Even with the above restrictions , it is fair to say that there are hundreds of thousands of good-quality bibliographies in computer-readable format on the desktops of researchers and librarians, as well as on the open Web, and they're ripe for …