After giving some background and comments on the BIBTeX bibliographic database system, we discuss the problem of searching large collections of such data. We briefly describe how relational databases are structured and queried.
Portable new programs, bibtosql and bibsql, are introduced and their use is illustrated. The first handles the conversion of BIBTeX data to input for three free, popular, and portable, database systems. The second provides a uniform and simple user interface for issuing search queries to any of the supported backend databases.
We finish with a discussion of the contributions of the two late computer scientists to whom this article is dedicated.
