The CEGIS Online BibliographyHolly K. Caro

In late May of 2009, the Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS) decided to consolidate all of the bibliographic citations for materials created, cited, and used by CEGIS into one central database.

The database needed to comprise materials located in many places and forms, be accessible to researchers from the internal network, and have a separate location that would be accessible to the public.

Research MaterialsThis project involved the consolidation of: • Hardcopy journal articles scattered in various files and storage locations• Large volumes of digital PDF files scattered in various folders and server locations• A considerable amount of CEGIS publications (mostly listed on the CEGIS website)• References for in-progress projects that had to be collected via email • All of the resources cited in existing CEGIS publications

ToolsThe project started with the use of two software programs, Endnote and WikIndX. A third program, Zotero, was added later.

Endnote was selected for day-to-day Endnote is a paid and licensed program management of the master copy of the database.•Provided faster data input • More navigable search features (including keyword search)• Was already in use within the community of researchers

WikIndX was selected for exposure to the GIScience community and the public.• WikIndX is a free and open source software• Users can view, download, and export the bibliographic entries• Includes an in-text citation

Zotero was selected later than the other two programs to allow for an alternate path of access to the resources.• Zotero is a free add-on for the Firefox web browser• Users can join the CEGIS Online Bibliography group to access the bibliography online• Resources will update automatically for group member• Allows for users to go straight to the resources, if available online

The research materials cover a broad definition of geospatial information science, including theory, applications, and geospatial data, including such topics as topographic mapping, land remote sensing, geographic analysis and monitoring.

Building the BibliographyConsisted of a simple process:1) See if the record already exists in the Endnote Library2) If it does, update the fields as necessary3) If it does not, create it

Exporting

EndNote

WikIndX Zotero

Endnote is the master copy, and is available to CEGIS researchers on an internal shared drive that is inaccessible to the public.

Copies of the master Endnote version are exported, and then imported into WikIndX and Zotero. The WikIndX and Zotero versions are updated monthly.

ProgressThe CEGIS Online Bibliography currently contains more than 1500 resources and continues to grow both in the number of resources available and the completeness of those resources.

The WikIndX version has been completed and will be made available online in the coming months. The Zotero version is available online at www.zotero.org/groups/cegis_online_bibliography.

http://cegis.usgs.gov

October 8, 2010

Problems EncounteredDuring the building of the bibliography, several problems of varying severity were encountered. There was a long delay in importing the bibliography into WikIndX because the field did not convert correctly, and the load times were slow, causing every iteration of attempting to import to take longer. Because WikIndX is free and open source, and not a finished and sold product, the errors and responses it gave were sometimes difficult to understand, further hampering attempts to import. During an upgrade from one EndNote version to the next, all of the custom fields in the bibliography were overwritten with new headings, and needed to be hand corrected. At one time, CEGIS planned to include abstracts in the bibliography, as this would have made searching for relevant articles much easier; because copyright laws are murky on the use of abstracts for this purpose, they have not been included. Zotero’s ability to store and go to web addresses has somewhat made up for this fact. Some general difficulties were encountered in importing to Zotero, primarily concerning the format of list fields between EndNote and Zotero; the keywords field had initially been uniformly implemented with semicolons separating the keywords, but Zotero would read the field as one long keyword with several semicolons in the middle. The overly long keywords crashed the first few attempts to import into Zotero, causing a manual reformat of all the keyword fields.

Audiovisual Material; 2

Book; 200

Book Section; 153

Computer Program; 2

Conference Paper; 28

Conference Proceeding ,

127Electronic Article; 6

Electronic Book; 10

Generic; 3Government Document, 5

Journal Articles; 801

Magazine Article, 18

Report; 5

Thesis; 14

Unpublished Work; 11Web Page; 81

DocumentationInformation about the conventions and process used in building and maintaining the bibliography has been stored in a private myUSGS wiki, where it is accessible to CEGIS staff and researcher. References

Thompson Reuters (2009). EndNote (X3) [computer software].

WikIndX (version 3.8.2). (2007). [computer software]. Available from http://wikindx.sourceforge.net/index.html

Center for History and New Media (2009). Zotero. Available at http://www.zotero.org/

• Records were entered by copy-and-paste where possible to reduce typing errors