Re: text to bibliographic markup up-conversion

I don't have an answer James, but would like one too. 
Years ago, I ran a pilot attempt to extract lists of faculty
publications (taken from CVs) into a usable consistent format.
What I discovered was that (1) there are as many formats
as there are faculty members, more or less; (2) that much
information in citations is so compact and abbreviated or assumed
as to be very difficult even to interpret (by someone outside the
field), much less extracted automatically; and (3) that what
many humanists think of as citations, i.e. print publications in
the form of books, chapters, or articles, represent the tip of
an iceberg of different kinds of communications that get cited
in lists of publications in fields like electrical engineering,
genetics,
and medicine (patents, video games, commentary, code,
etc.)  I gave up on automatic extraction, concentrated on manual
extraction, and even then, after five iterations of increasingly
undemanding specs, despaired of being able to convert thousands
of such citation lists accurately and inexpensively.

Here is version 5, which may serve at least to suggest some
of the different formats and problems likely to be encountered:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pfs/cvs/spec_05.html

pfs

ps I should say that I did not, in most cases, have access to
a digital text of the source--many were image files wrapped
in pdfs. So simple data capture was also an issue.

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017, at 11:30, James Cummings wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> This isn't necessarily related to TEI per se (though there is no 
> reason I couldn't use TEI as an intermediate format).  I'm 
> looking into various ways to get printed & OCR'd or word document 
> lists of bibliographic items into a more structured forms.  For 
> example a plain text list of items into BibTeX format to then 
> import into a system like Zotero or Endnote. The bibliographies 
> in question have _not_ been created with any reference-manager 
> software.
> 
> There are a number of tools suggested at 
> https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/importing_formatted_bibliographies 
> but some of these are only web-based. (Though a couple like 
> FreeCite at Brown have an API.)  I definitely would prefer 
> something that was scriptable and even better if there is already 
> some nice commandline script for me to call per citation or long 
> list of newline separated citations.
> 
> I don't mind if it goes direct to some popular bibliographic 
> interchange format like BibTeX, or if it has another structured 
> format (XML, TEI, csv, etc.) as an intermediary.
> 
> I figured some of you have probably done this kind of thing 
> and/or have recommendations of existing tools that do this well.
> 
> -James
> 
> -- 
> Dr James Cummings, Academic IT Services, University of Oxford, 
> TEI Consultations: [email protected]
-- 
Paul Schaffner  Digital Library Production Service
[email protected] | http://www.umich.edu/~pfs/