Long ago some of this data started as a sequence of non-open library files associated with proprietary programs (endnote, sente in the early-mid 2000s). Once in awhile some of the data would explore other possibilities (papers, citeulike, mendeley, bookends, zotero). But nothing quite fit the combination of truly open/non-proprietary and flexible/hackable/future proofable.
Then the data was freed. It turned into a **plain text**/open/future proof file of a bibtex type format. And there the data has lived happily for ten years, being used with python routines or pandoc for conversion, integration to document prepartion formats intended for web or print publishing. It has enjoyed being managed with the excellent open source BibDesk program long developed for mac osx/macos. It has been also managed by the equally powerful and feature rich jabref program, which is also open source but runs on any platform (as a java application) including linux. In recent times the management has been minimzized (simplified meaning increasingly less external dependencies) with fuzzy-search and bash scripts at the command line.
Methods for transforming the file url links from BibDesk (which were macos specific) are detailed in a separate document '2018-11-01-bibdesk-convert.md'.
