28 August 2009, 1:53

Hello Heinz,

Thank you very much for your feedback though you are on vacation. It seems like we are on the same page for this feature. We will first start on the individual glossary and once that is up and running, Richard and Nigel will tackle the group / institutional glossary as that requires more development work.

Enjoy your summer

Kristina

08 June 2009, 14:48

Hi Kristina,

These are interesting featurest  The first thing that came to my mind is that I think  the bibliography would benefit from being able to be split, or organised into groups somehow.  For example, if I have 100 entries in my bibliography, and I'm making a view, I might actually only want to put 10 of those 100 entries into that *particular* view as references.

This could either be done by selecting which entries in the bibliopgrahy to put into a view individually, or creating re-usable groups of entries, which can be put into a view, or both.

However, what I think a more interesting approach might be, is to think about a more generic way of linking Mahara artefacts together - and then automatically give view authors the option of pulling in any linked artefacts to views - or maybe even specifying the depth of the links (eg, pull in no linked artefacts, 1 level of links only, or all links) - that way when you create other TYPES of artefacts, you could link them to bibliographic entries, and they would be automatically (or optionally) included in a view that included any of the artefacts linked to them.

That may be pie-in-the-sky thinking, but I think that would be a really cool feature to think about! :)

08 June 2009, 16:48

Hello Penny,

Being able to choose which bibliographic entries to show in a view would of course been wonderful. However, I think that will almost require its own reference manager engine. Or is that possible much simpler? As I am not a programmer, I do not have a great overview of such things. I would not be in favor of developing such a new manager as there are already many around that do a great job. Pulling them or at least one that is good into Mahara / building an interface is more the direction that I would go (besides making a general word processing document available).

In my second-to-last Mahara workshop for our students today (for June; more to come in September / October), I was asked by a number of them whether it is possible to upload a word / pdf document and have it displayed immediately in a blog post or view. That means they do upload a file, but the content is automatically extracted and made visible as if they had written the text online. That was interesting because it reminded me of what I had suggested for the My Bibliographies module. In the end it does not matter if the document contains a bibliography or some other formatted text. I guess that the bibliography feature would then split in two:

• displaying the content of a prepared rtf document in a post similiar to a blog post
• interface to a bibliographic manager file to display the content of a library more flexibly, e.g. only a few entries etc. as you suggested

If an interface is created to a reference manager file, then I guess the entries also need to be listed alphabetically similar to the glossary entries.

Kristina