Publications Database

The Computer Laboratory publication database is located at www.publications.cl.cam.ac.uk and is searchable by registered and non-registered users. To login as a registered user you much first obtain a Raven account from the University Computing Service. You can do this by filling in the first two sections of the applications form and posting it to the Computing Service.

Once you have your Raven account you can login to the Registered Users section of the publications database.

Adding Bibliographic Data

The entry of records is a two stage process. As a registered user you can create entries but you cannot enter them into the live archive. Your entries are left in an 'input' buffer and can only be moved into the 'archive' by the Librarian. The Librarian will check the format of the entries before making them available to others.

If you want to have the record entries added for you then you can give your bibliography to the Libraian who will arrange for it to be loaded. It is important that as far as possible the data is suppied in machine readable form as we wish to avoid re-keying and the introduction of errors that would cause.

Should you choose to upload the entries yourself then you can stop at any point either at the end or part way through creating a record and save the current state to continue later.

The informations you must supply for each entry is as follows

• record type eg Chapter in book, Journal article
• title
• authors
• journal reference and pages
• date of submission
• publisher
• status eg in press, published

in addition please give as much additional information as you can in the other optional fields.

After completing the metadata page you should upload a copy of the article. If your article is not in PDF format could you please make a PDF of it before submitting it to the repository. It is not manadatory that you supply a copy of the article but please do so if you can.

Once you have completed an item you should Submit it. It will then become visible to the Librarian who will check the bibliographic entry before adding it to the Repository. Submitted items can be removed or modified later if necessary but care should be taken to keep the records correct in what they contain even if they remain incomplete because for example an in press item has not yet been allocated a issue and page number range.

BibTeX entries

If you have existing BibTeX entries then these can be used as a starting point. Only a single entry can be submitted at once because of the need to add extra metadata. When you add the extract and references then please make sure you add plain ascii text - if you only have a PDF then you can get plain text from this using the linux tool pdftotext. The BibTeX entry is pasted into a window and this is then parsed and fields filled in in the appropriate form according to the record type.

Bulk Uploads

Facilities for bulk uploading of entries is being worked on at present. There are two routes that will be provided, the first is via XML records of the bibliography. These will have to be submitted to the archive administrator for loading.

The second route is via Perl scripting. This is probably most useful where the primary archive is to be maintained elsewhere and there is a need for updating of pre-existing items as well as the addition of new ones.

Bibliographic output formats

At present you can arrange that a list of your entries is displayed in a web page by using a URL like

http://www.publications.cl.cam.ac.uk/perl/search/simple?person=Robinson&person_merge=ALL&_action_search=Search

where you replace the surname with your own.

If you would prefer to download the entries in BibTeX format then go to http://www.publications.cl.cam.ac.uk/perl/search/bibtex and enter the search terms you require. You will be prompted to save the output to a file.

Additional output formats and a HTML page suitable for including in your own web pages will be provided in the future.