InterBib: General Information

Note: This document is somewhat out of date. For an update, see the Release Notes for the 2007 InterBib overhaul.

Context and Description of Service

InterBib is part of the Stanford Digital Library Project(SIDL). An important part of the project's vision is that digital libraries will not just be collections of information repositories. Rather, they will include aspects of communication among patrons and between patrons and human library staff. They will blur the distinction between personal collections and public collections, and they will include digitally available publication-related services.

InterBib is one such service. It provides three facilities: conversion of bibliographies among different formats, the processing of documents to include bibliographies, and the collaborative accumulation of bibliographies that can be searched. Currently, conversion is provided from BibTeX and Refer to nicely formatted HTML and MIF (the Framemaker common format), and to bibliographies in Refer or BibTeX formats. The bibliographies may contain link specifications. These will be translated to the selected target. Multiple bibliographies of different formats can be merged into one target. For details, see the help page for bibliography conversion.

Documents for bibliography processing currently must be RTF, HTML, Framemaker or MIF files. Similar to BibTeX, documents may contain citations which the service resolves and uses to create a bibliography. The bibliography is added to the document, and the resulting new document is delivered back. Again, the bibliography sources may be of different formats. For details, see the help page for bibliography-related document processing.

Bibliographies on the InterBib server can be searched for relevant entries. The search may run over multiple InterBib databases at the same time. As described elsewhere in more detail, the databases on the InterBib server are the ones submitted by using the service. For details on searching, see the relevant help page.

Access to a subset of the most frequently required functionality is available through simplified forms ( simplified conversion and simplified bibliography-related document processing). Full-functionality is available through more complete forms ( conversion, document processing, and search.

Some technical details are available.

Users provide bibliography files or URLs to bibliographies through the Web. Both the bibliography files and the documents to be processed are submitted to InterBib via the Netscape client-to-server file transfer facility.

Unless specified by the user, all bibliographies which compile correctly are retained by the InterBib server and are searchable a few minutes later. When asked for a bibliography to use for the references in a document, it is much faster to specify a bibliography that is on the InterBib server, than to specify the same bibliography over and over again for upload during repeated runs. Links to the server are sprinkled throughout the pages, so that you can always find the name your bibliography has on the server. InterBib tries to use the name of your bibliography file. If you submit multiple versions, they are named [bibname]-1, [bibname]-2, etc.

Known Bugs and Shortcomings

InterBib is not a general LaTeX interpreter. In particular, it does not handle math mode. Generally, this causes no problems because math symbols are not often found in titles. But abstracts will sometimes contain math symbols. This can cause an entry to be rejected with an error.
In general, you can rely on the fact that if you do not get an error, bibliographies will look as good as possible with the information available in the bibliography databases you submit. There may be warnings, but you can ignore them. One exception is the '$' math mode entry and exit symbol for LaTeX. These generate warnings 'Ignoring LaTeX math mode entry or exit'. You should check your result bibliographies to see whether the corresponding entries are OK, or whether they have strange symbols in them.
It is not possible to have HTML tags inside of citations within an HTML document. For example, the following does not work: "As was shown so cogently in [<a href="http://..."> miller96 </a>], tags are never a problem".

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Comments/bugs to Andreas Paepcke: