Mac OS X Services and Bib Conversion Utilities
I just had an idea of a perfect Mac OS X Service: a bibliographic conversion utility.
Here’s what I have in mind:
Say I’m doing online research in a catalog and I find a bunch of records I want to store. I have a choice of two export formats: MARC and Endnote. However, I just want to import them as MODS records into my XML DB.
So … select the records on-screen in Safari, go to Services menu item, and choose “Save Endnote to XML DB” and the text is passed to Chris Putnam’s bibliographic conversion utilities for conversion, and the output loaded into the XML DB.
When Chris is finished with his suite of tools, it would also allow services such as “Endnote to BibTeX” or “BibTeX to RIS” and so forth. Just a random idea for any Cocoa programmers out there…
Here’s some additional reading that might help:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CopyandPaste/Tasks/CreatingFilters.html
http://www.crackpot.com/geekfiles/cocoa-filter.html