Origin: I typed in most of GNUBIB, but I had help from some other people,
who allowed me to incorporate their personal bibliographies, or helped with
the typing. GNUBIB also contains a lot of stuff that we got from the net;
none of this latter stuff was copyrighted. The initial impetus was that one
guy here had a good bibliography on logic programming (my field) published
as a book, and he restricted on-line access to it because of the publisher's
copyright. John and I set out to duplicate it; we ended with more than twenty
times the number of references he had, because we did not restrict it to
just one field.
     
A short description of the collection: GNUBIB has over 55,000 references,
distributed across just about all areas of computer science. Some areas
are more represented than others: this reflects John's and my areas of
interest. The well-represented areas are logic and functional programming,
programming languages in general, operating systems, software engineering,
computer architecture, parallelism, computer science education, and others
I can't remember at the moment. Underrepresented is numerical analysis,
real-world applications (whether of the General Motors or the Internal Revenue
Service type) and some areas of AI such as expert systems, vision and
robotics. GNUBIB also contains a little non-computer science material,
e.g. the contents of Scientific American.
     
GNUBIB is organized accourding to source: e.g. all journal references are in
one directory and all references to a particular journal are in one file.
There are a couple of exceptions: some journals are split across multiple
files (they would be too big to edit otherwise), and there is a miscellaneous
directory. About half of the references are to journals, and about half of the
rest are from proceedings. For some journals, e.g. CACM and SPE, and for some
proceedings, e.g. POPL and ISCA, our collection is complete (i.e. we have
references for all the papers ever published in CACM since volume 1 in 1958).
     
                        Zoltan.