OOo Off-the-Wall: Back to School with Bibliographies

A bibliography, also known as "Works Cited" or "Reference List", is a list of sources for ideas contained in a document. Typically, the list is accompanied by citations, brief references within the body of the document, that direct readers to detailed information in the list. Depending on the format used, both the sources of ideas and of direct quotations may be used in a bibliography.

Bibliographies are used commonly in academic or research papers. In that form, they are considered to be not only proof of honesty but also an acknowledgment of the author's intellectual debt to others.

Whether you are using the Chicago, Modern Languages Association or American Psychiatric Association style for bibliographies and citations, OOo Writer's bibliography tools are flexible enough to handle your needs. However, the process of creating the bibliography is confused by two things. For one, bibliographies are lumped together with indexes and tables of contents. Second, OOo Writer provides misleading samples for its bibliography database. For this reason, it is worth walking through the process step by step to avoid confusion.

Information for Writer bibliographies may be stored in a database. There is a single database for each user of OpenOffice.org on the system. Called biblio.odb, it is located in the /.openoffice.org2/user/database folder in each user's home directory. It is based on the file of the same name in the /presets/database directory of the main installation in the /opt directory. When assembling a bibliography, you have the option of using this database or of storing bibliographic information within the current document.

Within a document, bibliographies consist of two parts:

Writer's database includes sample entries. Unfortunately, these samples need to be replaced, because they confuse more than they help. They are misleading or incomplete in several ways:

These errors are worth noting, because you might spent long minutes puzzling how to apply the example of the samples. You can't, so delete the samples instead of wasting your time.

To add or edit a bibliographic database:

1. Select Tools > Bibliography Database. The bibliography database opens. Sample records are included.

2. If you are editing an existing database, use several buttons on the toolbar to help you find a record to edit:

Each column head has a right-click menu that you can use to Hide the column to simplify the table. You can unhide columns by selecting Show Columns from any other column head.

3. Do one of the following:

The easiest place to add or edit information for a record is in the fields at the bottom of the screen. The fields correspond to the tables at the top of the screen.

You do not need to fill in all of the available screens. Instead, enter only the definitions you require for the form of citation you are using. A book, for example, requires different fields from a magazine article or an Internet site. Consult a guide to the bibliographical style that you are using for information about exactly what information each type of article needs.

Remember that each record must have:

For most citation formats, you also need to enter the Author, Book Title or Title for an article or shorter work, year of publication and the publisher. In some cases, you also may want to use one of the User-Defined fields for the city.

4. Add or edit any other records.

You do not need to worry about the order of records as you enter new ones. When you are finished, you can use the Autofilter button to arrange them in the order you prefer.

5. When you finish, close the bibliographic database window.

You do not need to save the database with a command. It is saved automatically when closed.