From: General Internet-accessible resources

[92-10-01-11-39.32] The 13th alpha release of refdbms version 3,
developed by John Wilkes of the Concurrent Systems Project at
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and Richard Golding of the Concurrent
Systems Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz, is now available.  It can be
obtained by anonymous ftp from <URL:ftp://ftp.cse.ucsc.edu/pub/refdbms>.
The system has been tested on Sun 3 and 4 systems running SunOS 4.1.x,
and on DECstations running Ultrix 4.1.  It is an experiment in
building weak-consistency wide-area distributed applications, and the
databases currently available for the system have a good systems
coverage.

The system includes tools to query the database, to produce
bibliographies for LaTeX documents, and to enter new references into
the database.  It is part of ongoing research into wide-area
distributed information systems on the Internet.

Features include:

- Distributed databases: a reference database can be shared among
  multiple sites.  Updates can be entered at any site, and will be
  propagated to the other sites holding a replica of the database.

- Multiple databases: every database has a name, and users specify the
  order in which databases will be searched.

- Private databases: databases can be private, available site-wide, or
  they can be made available to other sites.

- Database query by keyword, author, and title word.

- Translator for refer-format databases.

- Usable with LaTeX documents: the internal refdbms format can be
  translated into a special BibTeX format.

An up-to-date list of bibliographies exported by various institutions
may be obtained using anonymous ftp from
<URL:ftp://ftp.cse.ucsc.edu/pub/refdbms/current-databases>.