bibliographic management tools (or the fine art of procrastination)

phd, tools 14 Responses »
Oct 112010

I spent the better part of today playing around with bibliographic management tools. At the beginning of the day, I had several (small) EndNote libraries that I’ve been adding to for my PhD as well as a few other projects. I am, however, rather lazy, and I realised this morning that getting things I find on the web into EndNote X3 was far too cumbersome for my liking.

Sure, I could have walked up to campus in the torrential rain (and I’m not exaggerating about the rain, either) to get a copy of X4, which can extract metadata from PDFs. But, you know… lazy (and far too much of a princess to get that wet).

Having watched Howard Rheinghold’s explanation of how he uses “Twitter, search, Diigo, Delicious, DEVONthink, Scrivener to find, refine, organize information –>knowledge“, I started to think that maybe I should be looking for a new tool. While I was pondering downloading a trial of DEVONthink, Kathryn Greenhill tweeted the suggestion that a combination of Mendeley and Zotero, with full text stored in Dropbox, might work. I’m a Zotero fan, but I’ve been worried about scalability and the logistics of using it to manage something as big as a PhD. But essentially, I was already sold on Zotero as a tool. Mendeley, however, I had no experience with, so I decided to download it and have a play.

It was love at first site.

But back a couple of steps… The path to get my data into Mendeley was fairly smooth… I exported my EndNote libraries and then imported them, one-by-one, into Zotero. Then I did a bit of organisation to put my references into collections. After that, I downloaded Mendeley, installed it, signed up for an account, and turned on the function to continuously sync with Zotero. And bingo! All my references magically appeared in Mendeley.

Here’s what made me fall instantly in love with Mendeley:

  • The idea of being able to extract metadata from PDF files to populate item information. I say ‘idea’ because in reality, the examples I tried were great big failures, resulting in references that looked nothing like what they should have – wrong author, wrong title, wrong date, wrong publication, wrong topic… My intention had been to then export references created this way to Zotero – another great idea that didn’t work in practice.
  • Mendeley prompts you – with an unmissable dialogue box at the top of the data pane – to check and verify references when you import them. Given my experience with the quality of data imported into EndNote, I was really excited to see that new references were flagged to check, and just as importantly for lazy me, that with a single click I could search Google Scholar by title to verify the details. The final win on this front is that any details that aren’t correct automatically get fixed, and voila! You have beautiful data. If the item can’t be found by a title search, you can add the DOI for the item to the DOI field and retrieve the data that way – again, with a single click.
  • I really, really like being able to see at a glance what I’ve read and what I haven’t. Mendeley allows you to toggle a small dot beside each title from grey (unread) to green (read). Yeah, I could tag stuff as unread in Zotero, but I know from using this tactic in delicious that I’ll never remember to go back and edit the tags.
  • Functionality to view and annotate full text attachments is available in Mendeley – and it’s nice functionality, too. For a blissful couple of hours, I saw myself forsaking my nemesis, the office photocopier, forever.
  • Zotero integration means I can continuously download references from Zotero to Mendeley without any effort whatsoever. This appealed to me primarily because I wanted to use Zotero to capture data while trawling the web, and to integrate with Word when I’m writing, but I wanted to use Mendeley to verify data, and view and annotate full text.

Here’s where it all fell to pieces:

  • Syncing only works in one direction: Zotero to Mendeley. There’s no functionality in either Zotero or Mendeley to support automatic updates of Zotero. Strike one.
  • I kept getting duplicates in my Mendeley library. I puzzled over this for ages, until I realised it was only happening for references that came from Zotero, but which I had edited in Mendeley (to correct errors in the data). Turns out the automatic syncing functionality kept pulling in the references from Zotero, because they didn’t look the same as the references in Mendeley. Strike two. Which leads me to my next point…
  • Deduping is tedious. (That’s such a library geek word, isn’t it?!) Identifying and removing duplicate records in Mendeley is an entirely manual process. Find, compare, right click, delete. Repeat. And then repeat again because you forgot to turn off the automatic sync with Zotero. And then repeat again because you turned it back on just to double check your hypothesis. Strike three.

So, my short-lived love affair with Mendeley is over. I’ll watch developments, though, because I’m definitely open to giving it another try if and when an an automatic function for identifying and removing duplicates is added, and Zotero sync becomes a two way street.

The task monster in me feels as though I wasted a day messing about… But as one wise tweep of mind said to me today: I know that part of working with new tools is spending some serious time messing around.

My next challenge will be to have a play with Scrivener and decide if it will work as a repository for my notes, and potentially a tool for writing my whole thesis (and all the other smaller outputs along the way). Part of that task will be working out how Evernote (which I’m using now for note taking and brain storming) and Scrivener will differ in terms of my workflows (aside from the fact that Scrivener is better suited to writing content). As a part time student, I’m going to be working on this beast intensively for periods, and taking chunks of break time while I prioritise teaching and other research commitments. I’ll need to be really organised to manage that. Plus, I want to be able to store content I produce along the way in a manner that makes it easily reusable in different forums – from my proposal, to my confirmation of candidature materials, to journal articles, to the thesis itself. But that is most definitely a challenge for another day.

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trove's new list feature: a great tool for educators?

blogeverydayofjune, tools 14 Responses »
Jun 092010

A friend who works at the National Library sent me a tweet this morning asking if I’d consider using Trove’s new list feature for course reading lists.

The short answer is an emphatic yes. Currently, I use my Delicious account to share links with students by converting the feed for a tag or group of tags to JavaScript and embedding this in our Blackboard sites. It works really well. For next semester, I’ve also used Delicious to tag the books I’m putting on the unit reading list. So far, I’ve been tagging publisher records, book sites and Amazon records for titles, because at this point, my main driver for compiling the list is to get it to our liaison librarian before she goes on holidays this Friday – findability in the catalogue is secondary to sourceablity for purchase, so it makes sense to link to the sources. I’ve tagged everything with inn333reading and then added tags like libhasprint, libhasebook, libhasboth and libdoesnothave to create individual lists to send the librarian. Down the track, I’ll exchange the URLs I’ve bookmarked for catalogue record URLs to make the find and get process seamless.

I love the idea of creating the course reading list in Trove rather than Delicious because

  • it provides students with alternative suggestions for sourcing the books, should they not be geographically located in Brisbane, or should the book be checked out (including commercial options, which I do think is useful)
  • it exposes students to a key bibliographic database
  • it exposes students to the idea of constructing resource guides (particularly important in this unit on information services, products and programs)

I also really like that, in addition to items within the database, I can add a non-Trove website to a Trove list – this means I can bookmark pretty much anything, including journal articles in databases by pasting in a static link to a journal article in an aggregator database. This means I can bring the whole semester’s reading together, no matter what the format (although notably, I can do this with Delicious, too).

To make this a robust tool for educators, I’d like to see some additions, including (in order of importance)

  1. a Firefox plugin that allows me to add web resources to Trove lists without having to go to Trove
  2. an rss feed for lists, both so students can subscribe to it and see when I add items, and so I can convert it to JavaScript and embed it in a course site
  3. a widget that allows lists to be embedded in another site (could just be recently added items, or first five, or a tag cloud)
  4. option to save searches within a list – for example, I’d like to be able to point students to a particular subject heading
  5. ability to export the list as a bibliography in preferred format (for example APA) – this might already be possible – did I miss it?
  6. the ability to tag a specific journal article (I know this is asking for a lot) directly from the search interface – that is, without using the workaround of opening a separate window, locating the article, copying the permalink/static URL, and pasting it back into Trove to add the item as a non-Trove website. I’m not even sure if this is possible. It may be for some platforms – perhaps the addition of volume and issue fields on the “add to list” screen would facilitate the passing of this data in a URL? Hmm. Actually probably not. So this is probably the impossible request, but I’m gonna make it anyway!
  7. [late addition] ability to sort lists, for example by material type and whether my designated library has the items (thanks Jenny for the suggestion!)
  8. an ISBN lookup browser plugin that lets me see a resource on Amazon, right click and select an option to add the related Trove book record to a Trove list (I know, I know – I’m lazy, but these kind of things save administrative time)
  9. I like the idea of being able to add websites that aren’t catalogued in Trove, but it could be cool if, as people add resources to lists in this way, they became part of the database. Maybe a program for power users who can add records to the database, or alternatively, a moderated process that allows records to be added?

Can you imagine the possibilities for collaborative development of subject guides? Many libraries buy the same resources as each other and then invest copious amounts of time in developing subject guides locally. What if all the ATN libraries, for example, got together and developed a core set of subject guides using Trove lists? And with a national curriculum on the way, Trove lists could be incredibly useful for curating resource sets to support the curriculum – including digitised primary resources. The ability to compile and share lists across collections epitomises the idea of the contents of Trove being a national collection, by facilitating meaningful grouping. I love the idea that the school librarian at a small town out west can curate their own collection of curriculum support materials, including books from the school library, websites and digitised resources from the nation’s greatest libraries. But even more appealing than the fact that they can do this, is the fact that they might not have to do it locally. Resources can be curated into lists once to support countless customers. If we can reduce duplication of efforts across those areas of our collections that are alike other libraries’ collections, that allow us more time to focus in on what’s unique and special about our collections.

I’ve started compiling a list for the unit I’m teaching next semester. There are only two items in it so far, but compare it to my Delicious list – the Trove list is certainly prettier, and I like the idea of using a library-built product rather than a proprietary product.

So I think the Trove lists idea is really promising, and I’ll look forward to seeing further developments. Expect to see more on this here as I keep playing with the functionality.

Yet another smart and useful tool from our National Library.

[Update: @katykat pointed out that OCLC’s WorldCat does lists, too: example. However, the OCLC lists functionality doesn’t seem to allow you to add websites, which means I’d need an rss feed for the list, and I’d have to splice that together with an rss feed for weblinks from my Delicious account. Bit messy.)

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