Help: importing bibliography references (Gaia Guide)

Help: importing bibliography references help

Gaia Guide enables users to import a batch of bibliographic references as a text file. This import system is not perfect in that the author names are all imported as a single author name and so they need to be separated out manually. However, it does make the data entry process faster than a fully manual system.

Format of the data to be imported

To add a batch of bibliographic references to the database, you need to create a text file with the following properties:

  1. It must have a unicode UTF-8 or a unicode UTF-16 character encoding so that all characters in titles and names are preserved.
  2. The first row of the file MUST contain the following field names (they are case sensitive), in any order:
    • Catalog name
    • Catalog number
    • Authors
    • Year
    • Type
    • Title
    • Journal name
    • Journal volume
    • Pages from
    • Pages to
    • Thesis qualification
    • Thesis institution
    • Conference title
    • Book title
    • Book notes
    • Publisher name
    • Publisher address
    • Editor name
  3. Each subsequent row of the text file must contain all of the data about a single bibliographic reference to be imported.
  4. The values for each field in the row for a bibliographic reference must be in the same sequence as the column headings provided in the first row of the text file.
  5. The values for each field must not contain tab characters and all field values must be separated by a single tab character.

The data is validated during the import process and validation issues are reported. For example, year values need to be 4 digit integers.

Using Excel to format the data

The data format has been designed to make it easy to create the text file using Microsoft Excel (Other spreadsheet systems can also make it straightforward). For Microsoft Excel users, just follow these steps:

  1. Create the spreadsheet with the required column headings in the first row of the first worksheet.
  2. While viewing the worksheet with the data, use the file menu to save as either Unicode text (*.txt) or as UTF-16 Unicode text (*txt). That step will create a text file containing the data. It will be in either Unicode UTF-8 or Unicode UTF-16 character encoding, and it will be tab delimited (each field will be separated by a tab character).

The newly created text file is ready for uploading to the web server.