Tuesday’s edition of the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is online, and it’s RSSS day, with new papers by Andy Egan and Laurie Paul. There’s also _eight_ new papers posted by Friederike Moltmann and a review by Christopher Zorn of a new collection of papers on Habermas.

I spent way too much of today looking at software I could use to make the papers blog a more distributed effort. Actually, what I want more than the papers blog is a central database that has entries for and links to _every_ paper online, with searchable abstracts and keywords. Since there would be something like 5000 entries (I’d guess) I’m not going to write them all, so it would have to be a distributed effort. I would make some effort to keep it updated, and hopefully the updates would provide something like the service the papers blog provides.

Now it should be really easy to set up such a database, but I couldn’t see the easy way to do it.

One solution, which would be overkill, is to use “eprints”:http://www.eprints.org/ just as a database. Another solution would be to try and build a Wiki, but I haven’t been impressed by the search capacities on Wikis I’ve seen. (And I’m not sure a novice like me could set one up.) Another is to have a giant blog, but it really requires hacking into Movable Type to do so. Maybe Movable Type 3 will help here. Ideally this would be running by June, so when I go away for the summer the papers blog (or something like it) will still be there. But that’s unlikely to happen I think.