Alex Wright

A note on the notes

June 16, 2007

With a little help from Bookpedia, I've just put together an online bibliography for my book.

Given the sheer number of authors' Web sites out there, I've always been surprised at the relative crappiness of most Web bibliographies. Popular software packages like Endnote and Refworks treat the Web like an afterthought; while Web-based applications like LibraryThing and del.icio.us are more geared for social sharing than for managing bibliographies.

Bookpedia has been a nice surprise. It lets you import bibliographic data from Amazon and elsewhere, create custom HTML templates, select which data fields to include, add cover images for each book, links to Amazon and so forth. I especially like the way it gives you a brief thumbnail description for each book, making it easy to generate an annotated bibliography without having to actually, well, annotate anything.

Here's a sample entry:

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The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man Marshall Mcluhan (University of Toronto Press, Mar 1962) Since its first appearance in 1962, the impact of The Gutenberg Galaxy has been felt around the world. It gave us the concept of the global village; that phrase has now been translated, along with the rest of the book, into twelve languages, from Japanese to Serbo-Croat. It helped establish Marshall McLuhan as the original 'media guru.' More than 200,000 copies are in print. The reissue of this landmark book reflects the continuing importance of McLuhan's work for contemporary readers.

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At this point I've only created entries for books, leaving out the many articles and blog posts included in my original notes. But hey, it's a start. And in a further fit of biblio-geekery, I've also posted an HTML version of the index.

File under: Glut

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