Subject: Group power From: Jont Allen <jba(at)RESEARCH.ATT.COM> Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 07:58:44 -0500Dear List, It seems to me that in this list, we have a unique opportunity, given all our collective on-line knowledge, that we might capitalize on. And of course I have a specific proposal on how to use it, or I wouldn't be writting. Many of us need bibliographic data bases for writing papers. I propose that we collectively put our resources together, and come up with a set of common databases on various topics. For example, there might be one on pitch perception, pitch JNDs, loudness JNDs, timing JNDs (to take a recent topic), etc. We could standardize the format, and then provide shell or cgi scripts to convert the database into your preferred format (e.g. Bibtex, MSword, Framemaker whatever, etc.). Then when you are writing a paper and you want to form the reference database, you get on the web, send the website a list of your references, in some format, and it runs a database program to generate the list of references (such as bibtex), and ships you an ascii file in the format of your choice. We could start by sending in our existing databases and putting them on line. We would then reorganize these databases into logical groups, organized across topic. Optionally each reference could have a short paragraph associated with it that summarizes the reference's contribution (assuming it has one ?;0). What do you think? Jont -- Jont B. Allen, Room B009; AT&T Labs-Research 180 Park AV; Florham Park NJ 07932 973/360-8545voice, x8092fax; http://www.research.att.com/info/jba;