Historically PAL began making use of the Unix OpenSource application Bibex in 1992 in conjunction with the text editing UNIX commands Nroff/Troff. This was one of a diversity of approaches adopted in the LTER Network during its second decade (Chinn and Bledsoe, 1997). Bibex served as the PAL citation collection mechanism until around 2000 when a majority of users began using Microsoft Word for manuscript preparation. The bibliographic software Endnote developed synergistically and was incorporated into MSWord itself so soon was used by the many PC and MAC authors. Nroff/Troff design included the export of an ASCII parsable file compatible with and importable into Endnote. In 2000 the Palmer LTER bibliographic collection approach was migrated entirely to Endnote while the LTER Network Office began using the related software Reference Web Poster in 2001. Migration to a more scalable, centralized database management scheme occurred in 2005.