Dear Jane, Jim and All;

I am no great lover of spreadsheets and databases but I wanted to explain
my point. As a bibliography to a book I like very much the author title
format. But as a stand alone piece what good is it? If you are just
interested in authors it is great, but most of us want some information
about a particular bulb species. If one looks at most scientific journals
today, they have at the beginning of each article a list of keywords. If
one placed these three or four words in searchable fields, then one could
still present the author title information but have a way of searching the
data for special topics. This works for short papers. But what about
Floras and the like. You would have to have a field for every species
listed to be of value. Of course that would be great. I can imagine how
nice it would be if one could enter a species name and bring up all the
literature that related to that species. Unfortunately that would be a
huge task. But as I explained before a simple list of
authors-date-titles would soon get out of hand and be of little value. I
can provide such a list of over a thousand works relating to Iris but of
what value is it. As it stands as part of the Encyclopedia of Iris it
notes where information in that work comes from. But using it to work
backwards would not be very productive unless one wanted to repeat the
ten years of research I have just completed,
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