Quick introduction to the Citation Style Language (CSL)

Lightning talk proposal for ELAG2010 conference. I definitely need to cut some slides to keep it in 10 minutes!

1. Quick introduction to the
Citation Style Language (CSL)
Jakob Voß
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG)
Lightning Talk proposal
European Library Automation Group Conference
May 2010

2. Citation Style Language (CSL)
Bibliographies & Citations
Solved again and again and again
in various reference management software
in library software presentation layers
Zillions of citation styles
Best open standard: BibTeX. Which sucks!
@book{nelson1987,
edition = {87.1},
title = {Literary machines},
isbn = {0-89347-055-4},
publisher = {Mindful Press},
author = {Theodor Holm Nelson},
year = {1987}
}
T.H. Nelson, Literary machines, Mindful Press, 1987.
Nelson, T.H., 1987. Literary machines edition 87.1, Mindful Press.
Nelson TH. Literary machines. 87. ed. Mindful Press; 1987.
Nelson, T.H. Literary machines. (Mindful Press: 1987).
Bibliographic Data
Nicely formatted

3. Citation Style Language (CSL)
Citation Style Language (CSL)
CSL processor
bibliographic &
citation records
citation style
(in CSL)
bibliography
& citations

4. Citation Style Language (CSL)
CSL Styles
Described in the CSL 1.0 specification
Huge Zotero stylesheet repository (CSL 0.8)
Mendeley (et al) work on WYSIWYG editors
http://bitbucket.org/csledit/csl-wysiwyg-editor
<!-- example snipped from the Chicago Manual of Style in CSL -->
<macro name="container-contributors">
<choose>
<if type="chapter">
<group delimiter=", ">
<choose>
<if variable="author">
<names delimiter=", " variable="editor">
<label form="verb" suffix=" " text-case="lowercase" />
<name and="text" delimiter=", " />
</names>
</if>
</choose>
...

5. Citation Style Language (CSL)
CSL Processors
citeproc-js runs in Firefox and other Gecko-
based browsers, Google Chrome, Safari, IE6+
& Rhino and spidermonkey/tracemonkey for
server-side deployments
http://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js/
More (or less) processors:
Haskell http://code.haskell.org/citeproc-hs/
PHP http://bitbucket.org/rjerome/citeproc-php
Phython http://github.com/bdarcus/citeproc-py/
Ruby http://github.com/bdarcus/citeproc-rb/
…
Join the coders, documentors, testers!

6. Citation Style Language (CSL)
Input formats
CSL is independent of the input serialization
(currently JSON, later XML, RDF etc.)
Implied conceptual data model
Bibliographic items
name fields (author, editor, translator...)
date fields (issued, original-date...)
textual and numeric fields (title, issue...)
Citation items
references to bibliographic items
prefix, suffux, locators („see page 23“)
To be done
Map our data (MARC etc.) to CSL records
Much already done in Zotero

7. Citation Style Language (CSL)
Output formats
indent
block
left-margin right-inline
bold light italic
SMALL-CAPS underline
sup

sup
CSL is independent of the markup language
Output in HTML+CSS , RTF, LaTeX, XSL-FO...
Basic formatting capabilities

8. Citation Style Language (CSL)
Thanks
and kudos to
Frank Bennett
Rintze Zelle
Bruce D'Arcus
visit CitationStyles.org