The setting For a few years now I've had an itch to scratch, namely, finding a nice way of keeping a normalized bibliographic database to use with LaTeX 1.
BibTeX unfortunately lends itself to a lot of variability in how entries are stored, and in my experience, it's always been slightly painful to work with, especially when collaborating with other authors. Very often entries are incomplete, or repeated under different keys, or use inconsistent formatting (e.