[Mycroft] 2 kinds of questions

[Matt Price]

Hello everyone,

I have 2 sorts of questions about mycroft plugins, both about
bibliographic search engines....

1) ever since I discovered mycroft I've been enthusiastic about adding
library searhch engines.  Yesterday I wrote a couple of little .src
files for subscription-only  databases -- the online Oxford English
Dictionary, and the enormous JSTOR archive of scanned-in journal
articles from the humanities.  I think it should also be possible to
write a plugin for the ISI Web of Science... 

I was wondering whether there's any point in submitting these plugins
to you guys.  The JSTOR plugin in particular involved a fair bit of
hunting around in the results pages in order to figure out how to
construct the input fields; so I'd like to save other people the work
of piecing together the logic of their search engine.  But my plugin
will only work for people working on computers that jstor recognizes
as belonging to institutions tht have subscriptions to the archive...
so it's bound to disappoint some of the folks who try to use it.
What do you think?

2) I also finally managed to install the SearchSideBar on firebird
yesterday (needed root privileges, duuh), and I really like it.  But
one thing I notice is that the complex bibliographic search engines
have non-identical boolean syntax -- so it's really hard to combine
searches in, say, the University of California Library, the Library of
Congress, and the Harvard library system.  If it were possible to have
more than one search field -- say, Author, Title, and Subject/Keyword
-- then combining searches would be much easier.  Writing the search
plugins wouldn't be that much harder then it is right now, provided
the Sherlock syntax is flexible enough to allow for multiple user
inputs.  (Since it's clearly modelled on the HTML "FORM" syntax, I
imagine this should be possible).  But modifying the code for the
SideBar might be much more complicated.  Do you have any idea 
how
feasible it would be to write a BibSearchSideBar based directly on the
SearchSideBar code, but adding a couple of extra input fields & maybe
changing the location of the search plugins?

Anyway, thanks for taking the time out to red my mails!  

matt