Edit Bibliographic Data

Why Edit Bibliographic Data?

The third tab in the Edit page provides a flexible data entry interface allowing the entry of typed bibliographic resources, with distinct sets of entry fields. Resources may be owned by parent resources eg. chapters by books, or books by series and series by publishers. Data entry at up to five levels occurs within a seamless interface, with predictive search into the database to identify existing records (eg. discovery of an existing record for a journal article, lookup of a journal, publication details for a book series).

The editing and data structuring capability of Heurist has already surpassed most commercial systems, as of March 2006, and we wil lbe streamlining certain aspects - notably author handling and container reference lookup and disambiguation - over the next few months.

How to Edit Bibliographic Data

For a resource with container resources, such as a journal article (contained in a volume of a journal, perhaps belonging to a series), you will see two or more headings bars listing the resource and its containers. The first heading bar includes a pulldown list of reference types, the others change according to the reference type selected. Below the first heading bar, the fields appropriate to this reference type will be displayed in editing mode (data entry fields with information about what is expected on the right).

Tab between data fields. Each field indicates if it is required, recommended or optional. An insertion icon on the right of a repeating field allows the insertion of an extra value for that field (authors for example should be entered one to a line). After entering data for the top level resource, hit the Save button. The next level will open up (if applicable, and if in first time entry mode).

Predictive search is currently carried out on change of field, so it is worth typing one or two words into author or title and tabbing to the next field to see if the system finds the resource you are entering. If so, it can be inserted by clicking the left arrow against its title in the panel on the right, and the edit fields will close and be replaced by display-only fields. You can edit the resource details by clicking Edit Details.

Constructed titles: The title of each resource, whether top level or container, is constructed automatically from a concatenation of the fields entered, using a concatentation mask defined by the system adminstrators - for example, books end up with a constructed title consisting of the title entered, authors/editors and year, suitably punctuated. These constructed titles do not replace the reference title entered, they are simply used to provide a more informative title in search results ("Analytical Archaeology, Clarke, D.L. 1978", for example, rather than just "Analytical Archaeology"). Constructed titles are not used for bibliographic output, which goes back to the original title entered. If you feel that the constructed titles generated are not appropriate, let us know, as it's a two minute job to change it if we agree. Constructed titles can also be edited, but they will revert to a new constructed title if the bibliographic record is edited.