The NCSeT Reference Liturature Database is built upon RefBase. Refbase is an open-source web-based bibliographic manager designed to meet the needs of researchers, bibliographers, and librarians in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities for collaboratively building and sharing reference citations, while conforming to current international bibliographic standards. Available from refbase.sourceforge.net, Refbase is an open-source web-based bibliographic manager designed to meet the needs of researchers, bibliographers, and librarians in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities for collaboratively building and sharing reference citations, while conforming to current international bibliographic standards. In technical terms, the project employs open-source tools such as the MySQL database engine, the PHP scripting language, and web-design based on Web 2.0 standards and practices.
Refbase can import and export references in various formats (including BibTeX, Endnote, MODS XML, and OpenOffice). It can also make formatted lists of citations (in APA, MLA, or individually defined bibliographic styles), and it offers powerful searching, rich metadata, and RSS feeds, this last feature allowing individuals to receive automatic updates to citations for shared projects. NCSeT staff are currently working with the Refbase development team to add Web 2.0 tagging capability to the project.
Refbase is particularly appropriate for NCSeT because of its highly flexible and adaptible design, its ease of integration with other NCSeT web-based applications, and its relatively low cost. As an open-source project, Refbase invites the sharing of knowledge without restricting access to its underlying code; contributions to its functions and design which NCSeT staff make can be added to the project as a whole, while improvements made by others can be readily applied to the NCSeT project, and all this at no cost beyond that of the labor involved. NCSeT, thus, reaps the fruits of customized local development, while contributing to the larger community of knowledge. At the same time, because the NCSeT implementation of Refbase can be readily adapted to the needs of the NCSeT knowledge community, NCSeT staff have the opportunity to enhance researchers' access to vital information in the field.