During Deinde’s retooling one of my favorite pieces of software came out with a fantastic new version. Bookends released v.10 of its fabulous bibliographic software. Bookends already was the best of the bunch, and it now has left its competition in the dust. You can read my SBL Forum review here. There are too many new things to go into major detail, but we have a revamped window, a hugely updated list view which includes a PDF viewer and a number of different viewing configurations. Bookends also implemented a local URL system which assigns a URL to every citation and allows you to place the link anywhere you want. Customizing how you cite, link, and view citations have all been made more customizable as well.

For those who may use my Guide to SBL format with Bookends, I have updated it a little bit to conform to the latest version. You can download here.

The release of the latest Bookends has also brought to light a new free web resource that even those of you who don’t use Bookends may find useful. The site is called Refbase, and is basically a place to freely store your references - books, articles, book chapters, etc. The user can populate your database with records in bibliographic formats. The database can be searched, tagged, organized, and formatted for your bibliography or CV.

For fellow Bookends users, the sweet thing is being able to upload directly from your Bookends database. And from talking with the developers, this connection is only going to get better so that eventually I can have an online replica of my reference database. It is a very promising resource. If you are tight on cash and don’t need the full power of a bibliographic manager, refbase along with the free Firefox plugin Zotero may be just what the doctor order for you.

Happy citing!