1. Introduction
   1. Main Features
   2. Installation

# Introduction

Bibus is a bibliographic database.
It has been developed with OpenOffice.org (http://www.openoffice.org/) in mind. This means that the database is modeled on OpenOffice.org bibliographic database engine. As such it has the features and most of the limitations of this format. However, one of the most annoying limitation which is the restriction to 80 characters of any field, has been addressed in bibus where the fields are 255 character long (or even unlimited, depending on the database engine used).
However, Bibus is in development and there are many evolutions planed for the OpenOffice.org bibliographic engine. Bibus will try to evolve alongside these changes.
Is Bibus stable enough for using it on a daily basis? As usual, Bibus is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY and you must use it at your own risk. However, since the heart of Bibus is a high quality database engine (MySQL and SQLite), I think the risk to get a catastrophic crash is very low. You must however remember to make regular backups of the database. If you use SQLite, you just have to copy the database file. If you use MySQL the easiest way is probably to use mysqldump (mysqldump -p Biblio > biblio.sql).

## Main Features

- Compatible with two database engines: MySQL <http://www.mysql.com/> and SQLite <http://www.sqlite.org/>.

- Hierarchical organization of the references with user defined keys.

- Drag & drop and Copy/Paste to easily organize references.

- Designed for multiuser:

  - You can share the database between an "unlimited" number of users.

  - Each user will have his/her own classification.

  - You can have read-only and read-write users.

- Powerful and easy to use search engine.

- Live queries, i.e searches that will update when the database changes (this is simply a saved SQL query).

- On-line PubMed access.

- Import PubMed (Medline), EndNote/Refer, RIS, ISI and BibTeX records.

- Export to PubMed, Refer, RIS and BibTeX.

- Connection to OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word. You can insert references in an open OpenOffice.org/Word text document and format the bibliography directly from Bibus.

- Thanks to Python and wxWidget, Bibus should work on most modern platform (GNU/linux with gtk; Windows; MacOS; etc...).

- Foreign language support through unicode and gettext. For the moment, Bibus is available in English, French, Portuguese and Danish. Feel free to translate it in your favorite language, this is easy and fast. It took me about 1 hour to translate the bibus.pot file in French.

## Installation

For up-to-date informations please read the installation doc online here and here.