Roman Schneider
 
 

Planning for new media - The Bibliography of German Grammar goes online
   

1. Introduction

The evolution of computer technologies and the introduction of the World Wide Web (WWW) have substantially changed the way scientific articles and books are published today. Besides writing for "traditional" print media, more and more authors decide to reach a larger audience and to decrease distribution time by offering their works on the internet. The electronic medium not only facilitates the spread of information, it also adds new value by extending the possibilities of knowledge retrieval. Of course the same is true for structured data collections like scientific glossaries, dictionaries or bibliographies. They particularly profit from the web when being accessible via user-friendly and effective frontends.

The following chapters deal with the transformation of the Bibliography of German Grammar ("Bibliografie zur deutschen Grammatik") from a data pool primarly used for print publishing to a relational database application offering a basis for media-independent distribution. Starting with a short description of the beginnings of the bibliography, the focus of this article lies on the explanation of our current database design as well as on the presentation of the web-based user interface.

The Bibliography of German Grammar, currently hosted at the Institute for German Language ("Institut für Deutsche Sprache") at Mannheim/Germany, is an up-to-date collection of more than 10.0000 scientific publications dedicated to German Grammar. Besides the usual bibliographic information (author names, title, year, place, publishing house, etc.), these entries are enriched by additional headwords, object words and language information to enable users to search this bibliography by different criteria. Since 1999, the retrieval frontend is part of the GRAMMIS information system (see [1]), which is an approach to grammatical knowledge on the internet. It can be accessed via http://www.ids-mannheim.de/grammis.

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