Thursday 25 August 2011

Referencing references

I can well relate to Isla's recollection of laboriously typing up bibliographies.  There seemed to be an unholy emphasis on the correct placement of commas, semicolons, spacing, etc by my markers which meant hours working on them in scrupulous detail.  The joys of library studies in days of yore.  It would have been great to have had access to tools like those described in this Thing 14 blog.
Again, thanks for the really clear, useful introduction to these tools.  I can't see any immediate, personal use for them, but it's good to know more about them, so I can talk knowledgeably (well, to a certain extent) should the occasion arise.
I checked with my daughter, who is currently at university, to see if she had used any of these tools.  She replied that she uses Endnote, and thinks "it's great, certainly gets the job done."
I have Chrome at home, so I downloaded Zotero there, but found it wasn't "intuitive" enough for me to use.  There were help screens, but they were referring to the Firefox interface, which looked different to what was on my screen.  So I just gave up (could be my loss, but time is precious and it wasn't that important to me to "get it right") and moved on to Mendeley.  This time my experience was completely different.  I easily picked up what I needed to do to collect documents into "My Library" before deciding that bed was looking very attractive.  I feel confident about going back though and exploring further.  Watch this space!

1 comment:

  1. I've not used zotero with Chrome, so your comments are interesting. Very glad to hear your daughter has found a system she finds useful and good luck when you explore further.
    Isla

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