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John Steinbeck Bibliography

The creation of the John Steinbeck bibliography of secondary materials began in 1975, under the direction of Dr. Martha Heasley Cox of San José State University. Dr. Cox and a research assistant, Greta Manville (then a graduate student at San Jose José University), began to compile records of secondary materials held far and wide.

My involvement in the project began when it came time to do something with a very large file in EndNote format. The staff members at the Center for Steinbeck Studies would be updating the source information regularly, so it was crucial that the information remain editable through an offline desktop application. The question then became how to work with a data format exportable from said desktop application, and how someone not savvy in the ways of databases and their ilk could get that data into the production database.

The solution was to create a script that could be run on the Windows machine of the staff member handling the export/import process. The staff member exported the EndNote collection into an XML file, ran the script that converted the XML file to a series of SQL statements, and then uploaded/imported the SQL into the production database. This set of processes, although disjointed, was the best solution given the access levels we had to the various technologies in use.

Before any scripts could be written—conversion, import, or otherwise—a significant amount of time was spent cleaning up the format of the data within EndNote, as well as setting ground rules for data entry. Suffice to say that this is a very customized solution and EndNote does not export the most consistent or beautiful XML I've ever seen.

However, at the time of its creation and for several years after, the online bibliography worked quite well and was used by scholars worldwide. Users could perform keyword searches with boolean connectors, could browse by author name, journal/newspaper/magazine title, and could save citations during the search session for easy printing. Since late 2009, the project was moved and has fallen into the hands of administrators less able to maintain the processes that were in place. I am not linking to it here because, to my mind, it's currently (and unfortunately) broken.