Biblioscape User Community

Paul asked me to contribute some notes on this forum about my experience in using Biblioscape. I hope they're of some help.

There’s no question that Biblioscape can be a bit daunting to a new user, because it has such a broad range of capabilities. It’s a lot more than just a straightforward manager of references. But in my experience you can find it useful very quickly so long as you just focus on the basics – storing stuff, organizing stuff, and citing stuff. Because these notes are supposed to be about how I use it, I’ve also added some thoughts on another feature of Biblioscape that I find invaluable, getting at stuff remotely. I’m uncomfortably aware that there are vast areas of the program that I’ve left untapped thus far, and I keep stumbling across more of them. But here I’ll stick to what I know best (or least worst).

Life before Biblioscape

I’ve been using bibliographic software since roughly the dawn of time, or at least that’s what it feels like. My first foray into this genre involved writing an application myself, at some stage in the ‘80s when I decided that I needed it for a thesis. This exercise gave me a healthy respect for anyone attempting such a venture, and when, a few years later, I discovered what real bibliographic software was capable of, I decided that writing it was best left to the professionals.

My first commercial bibliographic software was Papyrus, a cleverly-written application with the wittiest manual I’ve ever encountered (it has a hate figure called The Bibliography Editor, which each journal has, and whose sole aim in life is to ensure that his or her journal requires its authors to format references differently from any other journal on the planet). Unfortunately, Papyrus never made it from MS-DOS to Windows and is no longer being developed, which meant that I had to find something else.

That’s when I discovered Biblioscape. There were a number of competing products at the time, all of which had their adherents and their strengths and weaknesses. What particularly drew me to Biblioscape was its range of capabilities by comparison with the other products I investigated, but most particularly, its capacity to be accessed remotely over the Internet. That really mattered to me because I work at a university – that is, they pay me for turning up reasonably regularly – which is a multi-campus operation, meaning that I regularly work from three different locations including my study at home, and not so regularly from other locations around the globe. The idea of having a single database located on a computer at one of the offices, but accessible from anywhere in the world, was very attractive. And it became even more attractive when I thought about the exigencies of working on a paper with colleagues.

In retrospect I’m somewhat surprised to find myself admitting that both criteria were good ones. I have found the flexibility of Biblioscape to be a very good thing even though I’m sure I’ve used only a fraction of what it offers, and the Internet accessibility of the system has been incredibly useful. So how do I use it?

General impressions

Biblioscape can do an awful lot, which means that it has a very complex interface which can take some getting used to. You also need to learn the basics about things like how to enter authors’ names so that Biblioscape understands them correctly. Figuring out which field is for what can be a little demanding, too, because there are so many of them. You may well find yourself changing the way you use some of the fields as you get more experienced. Some things, such as formatting authors’ names and temporary citations, need learning straight away; others, such as the various ways of storing notes, are probably best left until you’ve used Biblioscape for a bit and you’ve got used to how they all work.

Biblioscape does have this habit of popping up obscure error messages from time to time, although it’s doing it a lot less than it once did. Mostly they require you to shut it down and restart it, and usually this has to be done using Task Manager, but the good news is that they’ve never, in my experience, damaged the database. Every so often it’s a good idea to rebuild the database because errors do creep into the indexes from time to time, but the database itself seems extremely robust. Once a reference is in there, it stays in there.

Storing stuff

Primarily, I use Biblioscape as a place to put stuff that I might want to look at later. One of the hazards of academic life is that you constantly encounter papers, books, chapters, manuscripts, websites, articles, snippets of information, quotations, theses, and so on, and you never know what to do with them. You have this sneaking suspicion that they’re going to be useful at some stage in the future, but right now you can’t think how, so they need filing in a form that gives you a fighting chance that you might be able to locate them when you do need them.

Just now, for example, I was seized by the thought that I’d encountered a quotation somewhere in the past few years in which an author had said something about people thinking that the time in which they live is unique. I did a search of my Biblioscape database on the word “era” (which produced a manageable 41 hits, much to my surprise), and there it was in the “Memo” field of a 1999 paper: “It is a human tendency to believe that one lives in an exceptional era, fundamentally different from earlier periods”. That’s a quote that I think everyone who writes about societal matters should have framed above their desks.

I could find this because I put any notes I take about papers in the “Memo” field (previously, the “Notes” field) of the reference. I don’t worry too much about whether I’m going to find it useful in future; I just put in notes, extracts from the article (hopefully, not forgetting the page references), and commentaries in a disorganized fashion, and rely on Biblioscape’s various search facilities to find the material later.

I tend to use the much more extensive Notes module for commentaries on more than one paper, but this could well change now that notes are much more integrated into the References module through the “Taking Notes” tab in the reference editor. I’m still trying to figure out a routine for taking advantage of this new arrangement and its very interesting enhancement, the Composition module (which can be used to assemble notes into draft papers).

I also make liberal use of the links facility, for example to show which references cite which. This is very handy when you’re having trouble tracking down a particular reference; sometimes the search leads you to a related one which is linked to the one you want.

There’s a corollary of Murphy’s Law which states that any extract that you copy into your database will almost, but not quite, include everything you actually need when you come to write a paper, so I also try to store a way of getting to the full article. For journal papers this is getting increasingly easy as archives like JSTOR include stable URLs (URLs which will always point to the article in question), so I just put the stable URL, if it’s available, into the “URL” field. For articles without stable URLs, I usually download the pdf file (or scan the article if, for example, it’s a book chapter or a paper from a very old journal issue) and store it in a directory on the same computer that stores my Biblioscape database (see below under “getting at stuff remotely”). I don’t use Biblioscape’s attachment facility for storing papers because (again, as explained below) my database is located on one of my computers which I can reach from anywhere in the world, and attachments have to be on the local machine to work. So I have an FTP server on the machine that stores the references and files, so that all I need do is put the URL of the paper in the URL field of the reference. The term editor is very useful here for inserting the routine bits of the URL – the bits that specify the userid, the password, and the domains (e.g. ftp://userid:password@myftp.myuniversty.edu/).

Then when I need the paper, all I have to do is click on the URL and it’s downloaded and displayed on the screen. In Biblioscape 8 it’s even easier: click on the “URL” tab at the bottom of the main window or halfway down the Reference Editor, and the document appears in Biblioscape’s window. Very cool.

Organizing stuff

Biblioscape has many different ways of organizing references. Folders are probably what I use least, because a reference can only be in one folder, and the kind of work I do means that references really don’t split neatly into non-overlapping sets. They do have their uses, though, for example for importing references. Importing is a bit of a hit-or-miss affair in which you can never really tell whether it’s going to work properly until after you’ve done it. There are just so many different ways in which references can be tagged for import that creating accurate filters for them is extremely difficult. Sometimes, as for example in the case of the vast but ineptly tagged CSA Illumina database, it’s virtually impossible, and the only thing you can do is import the references as best you can and then fix them. If you import the reference into the body of the database it can sometimes be hard to track it down if something really weird happened and you don’t know which data is in which field so you don’t know what to search for in order to find it. So I have a folders called “Imported”, and I always import references to this so that I can check them for oddities (mainly data in the wrong fields) and correct the mistakes before moving the new references to a working folder.

Categories are really helpful. I use them extensively to organize references for particular writing projects. They can even be used to help analyze the material in the references. For example, I’ve just been writing something about the definition of “career” (a surprisingly slippery concept with almost as many meanings as the writers who work with it). I built up a list of references that one might expect to have definitions in them, and categorized them as “Career definition”. That made it very easy to work through the list of all the references in that category, and assign each reference to two new sub-categories, one called “Definition” and the other “No definition” as appropriate. Then I could go through the references in the “Definition” sub-category and examine the different treatments that “career” has been given in the literature. If I’d thought more about it I could have examined each definition in turn and created sub-sub-categories for each different treatment of the topic, which would have made it even easier to write the review. Alternatively, if I’d been using Biblioscape 8, I could have created a note on career definitions. Then I could have looked at each reference in turn, and if its Memo field had had material which was relevant to the topic I could have linked the “career definitions” note to the reference and copied over the relevant bits. As I said above, Biblioscape is a lot more than just a place to store stuff.

Citing stuff

This is where bibliographic software is a life-saver, and it’s probably the main reason that most people buy it. Biblioscape’s approach involves inserting so-called temporary citations in the text where you want the citations, and then formatting the paper when needed, and it works pretty well. I got a glimpse of how complicated the process is when I wrote a macro that formats WordPerfect documents for Biblioscape; by the time I’d finished I had 2000 lines of code and a serious headache. The problem is that posed by our old friend, the Bibliography Editor: the rules that journals impose for how references must be formatted are usually complex, often (e.g. APA) stupidly so, and occasionally (e.g. the legal profession’s Blue Book) moronically so. You’d think these highly-educated people could think of something better to do with their time, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.

The outlets I write for require the author—date formatting system, and I really like the way Biblioscape handles this. It takes a little getting used to – frankly, it’s a bit geeky – but once you’ve got the hang of it you can do a lot with it very easily. I find Biblioscape’s ability to leave out the author, the year, or the parentheses when required extremely useful, for example when I have to say something convoluted like:

…as noted by Goffman (1959; see also Bourdieu, 1989; Van Maanen, 1982, p. 98)

which, for the record, is done as follows:

…as noted by Goffman ([^np ^na Goffman, 1959 #16257]; see also [^np Bourdieu, 1989 #16267 / Van Maanen, 1982 (, p. 98) #16252])

If you’re not familiar with how to format temporary citations this will look a mess; but the rules are very straightforward and quickly mastered. In case you’re very new to Biblioscape and you’re baffled as to why anyone in their right mind would want to go to the trouble of concocting code like that instead of just typing the citation exactly as they wanted it to appear, it’s so that when you format the paper, Biblioscape can construct the bibliography for you. If you’ve ever had to do that chore by hand you’ll know that this feature of bibliographic software alone is worth the price of admission.

Getting at stuff remotely

I find this capability of Biblioscape extremely useful; I use both Internet features: BiblioRemote and BiblioWeb.

BiblioRemote is a server that sits on the machine that you decide is going to provide the home for your database; that is, it’s a small application that runs on the machine and allows Biblioscape users elsewhere to use the database as if it were on their own machine. Using Biblioscape over BiblioRemote is a bit slower than if the database were on your local machine, and if you have a bad Internet connection it can be painfully slow, but under these circumstances BiblioWeb provides a good alternative. My copy of BiblioRemote runs on a PC that sits under my desk at my main office at the university. Fortunately, our university network people aren’t obsessed with the need to control everything, so I don’t have any trouble accessing the database from computers anywhere in the world. If you do have paranoid network people you may have a problem here unless you can persuade them to open the appropriate ports for you. BiblioRemote takes a little while to get the hang of, but once it’s up and running you can forget about it; it just runs without needing any attention. It’s great for collaborative work, although more often than not my collaborators haven’t been Biblioscape users, which is where BiblioWeb comes in handy.

BiblioWeb provides a pretty useful set of features for editing and searching your database from a web browser. Like BiblioRemote, it runs on the computer that you’ve designated as the home of your database. It’s much more tolerant of slow Internet connections than BiblioRemote. When I’m working on a project with a colleague who isn’t a Biblioscape user, I just create an ID for them on BiblioWeb, and they can get at the same references that I can, add temporary citations to the paper we’re working on, and even format the paper when necessary. It’s also a great way of setting up a reading list for a doctoral class, too; the students can access the papers easily, and they can learn something about bibliographic software in the process (it never fails to amaze me how many have no idea that such software exists).

That’s not all, folks

To reiterate my opening comment about what Biblioscape is capable of, I know that I’ve just scratched the surface of its feature set. There’s also the new Composition module, the Librarian module (a very useful way of keeping track of books that you lend to colleagues and students, or running a small library if your group has one), and a myriad other bits and pieces. Some are somewhat on the obscure side (for example the Charts module, which doesn’t seem to have been developed lately), and others you may well have other ways of doing (for example the Tasks module). I take the view that one of these days I might suddenly discover that one of these undiscovered features may dig me out of a hole, but that in the meantime there’s more than enough in the program to keep me happy.

Hugh Gunz
University of Toronto
June, 2009