Librarian X

My friend Colleen Harris called my attention to a new bibliographic manager program called Mendeley. I spent a little time trying it out today. I want to stress that this was a brief test run, and these are, as the title of the post says, just first impressions.

Mendeley, presently in version 0.6 beta, is free (but not open source), and runs on Windows, MacOS or Linux. I tried out the Windows version. It’s got two components: a separate desktop application like EndNote, and web-based storage for references. Add a bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and you get a somewhat Zotero-like experience of saving references from many databases and other sources like Amazon and Google Scholar. (It didn’t work with my library’s catalog, but did work with Worldcat.org.) You can save either single citations or pick from a list of search results.

It took me a moment to realize that citations were being saved to my online Mendeley library, and wouldn’t appear in the desktop application until I pressed the Sync Library button. This is a different experience than I’m used to, but wasn’t much of a hassle. The desktop client looks a lot like the Zotero interface (but outside of the browser window, obviously), and if you’re used to either EndNote or Zotero it will seem familiar and easy to use. If you’re using Mendeley on multiple computers it should be easy to keep your libraries in sync, a feature that Zotero 2.0 has but EndNote lacks entirely.

There’s also a Word plugin that installs as part of the setup. It didn’t work for me at first, and gave me an error message requiring me to reboot before it would work. The instructions in the error message were full of horrible spelling mistakes, which is a superficial complaint but didn’t really inspire me with confidence. Once I rebooted, it worked fine, and the process of inserting citations and creating bibliographies is just about identical to Zotero and EndNote.

Mendeley is clearly geared toward academics: there’s an online profile associated with your web account that includes publications, grants, and classes. It fills in suggestions for the name of your institution as you fill out your profile, and I had a hard time forcing it to accept “Georgia State University” instead of “University of Georgia – Georgia State University” (we’re a separate institution, not a unit of UGA, as Mendeley seems to think all of our state institutions are). There’s a My Publications group in the desktop client, and you can add publication credits to your Mendeley CV by dragging references here.

My first impression of Mendeley is that it’s easier to use than EndNote, and probably not quite as easy as Zotero. It’s not quite as mature as either product, but casual users and students probably wouldn’t notice many lacking features. The missing ability to import citations from library catalogs may bother a lot of potential users, but searching Worldcat or Amazon is a pretty easy workaround. The online storage puts it one up on EndNote, as it’s a lot easier to use than EndNote Web, and users who prefer EndNote to Zotero might want to consider Mendley as a free replacement. I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Mendeley: How it Works

Dan Cohen of the Zotero project reports that Zotero groups are presently in testing and will be available “very soon,” possibly even as soon as next week.

Presumably this will mean the ability to share references via the profile/follow feature on the Zotero site.  I’m pretty excited in a geeky way.

Zotero rolled out new versions of the stable and beta releases this week.  I had a bit of a glitch getting the sync function to work with this beta version, but a little digging through the Zotero forums fixed that.

More interesting is the fact that they’ve added online user profiles.  If you set up an account on the Zotero site (reserve your name!), you can suddenly upload a user picture, follow other users, and optionally make your entire library visible if you’re syncing with the Zotero server.

I hope this means that we might expect to see recommendations and citation sharing soon.  I’m looking forward to Amazon-style “researchers who liked this article also liked….”

Google has published a great 2-minute how-to video called Getting Started With Google Reader.  I added it to my RSS Libguide.  It’s also on their Reader Help page.  Nice job of translating RSS into plain language!

Cindi Trainor included my “How to make a Libguide” page on her Librarian’s Guide to LibGuides in the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase.  Thanks, Cindi!

ALA has created a Google Maps mashup listing all ALA-accredited library and information science programs. I know a lot of people (myself included) come to librarianship later in life when we’re married, own homes, etc., and relocating can be a major concern.

It’s nice to see ALA using some technologies a little more modern than HTML.

ALA-Accredited LIS Programs on Google Maps

Slideshare offers a very cool feature they call “slidecasting,” syncing audio with a slide presentation.

Unfortunately, they not only make the common mistake of referring to an mp3 as a podcast, they’re actually using an RSS icon to indicate an mp3.

I keep meaning to do more with Slideshare. It seems like it would be a great way to do tutorials and such. We’ve got an audio tour in the works that’s basically a slideshow with narration even though we’re producing it as Quicktime video. I should consider doing a Slideshare version.

I admit I’m usually amused by articles like this:

More (Unintentionally) Funny Student E-Mail Messages to Professors

But check out this quote:

“A student who didn’t show up for class on Monday morning just Facebooked me to ask where the class was. I am not responding to a Facebook message! Cripes!”

…um. This just makes me splutter in incomprehension.

Why on earth would a professor bother to set up a Facebook account and then refuse to use it to communicate with students? Yes, it’s possible that she set it up to network with friends and colleagues, but I’m willing to bet at least a dollar that that isn’t the case here. If it were, she wouldn’t consider text transmitted via Facebook’s server to be somehow inferior to text transmitted via the campus e-mail server.

A while back I got an e-mail from Twitter: “zotero is now following you on Twitter.”

Cool! They (he? she? does Zotero have a gender? It writes about itself in the first person) must have found me via my Zotero workshop outline, which I had sent to them. They (I’ll stick to “they” until I learn otherwise) don’t update very often, but maybe if they had more followers they would. It’d be a great low-key way to drop news and updates about the application.

I’ve been playing a game called PMOG: Passively Multiplayer Online Game (currently in closed beta, but I have some invitations available; if you want one, leave a comment). It sort of adds a second background layer to the web — one with a game in it. Players install a Firefox extension and accumulate points as they visit different websites during the course of their daily surfing. You can lay mines as traps for other players on sites (in the first screenshot, I tripped a mine laid on wikipedia.org by another player; don’t worry, my browser was wearing armor so I’m fine), or leave portals (links) from one site to another.

What I’m interested in here is the missions feature. If you’re not familiar with MMOGs, a common gameplay feature is the quest-giver or mission giver, who offer tasks for your character to complete (in World of Warcraft, they have big yellow question marks over their heads so you can spot them). In PMOG, players leave mission starting points all over the web, and you either happen across missions serendipitously or pick them from a list on the PMOG site. (In this photo I ran across a mission on flickr.com.)

A mission is basically a tour of a series of websites with explanatory text. Since you get PMOG “datapoints” for visiting new sites, you get points as you complete missions — but the really interesting feature is that it provides a way for one user to lead another through a series of sites and comment on each one. I haven’t seen another application that does this sort of thing. My first thought was “Jeez, I wish there was an easy way for us to use this to create tutorials.” How cool would it be to add our own commentaries on database sites for our users? Or lead them from one database to another? Or to a research guide?

An application like this allows for commentary to take place without interfering with the actual browsing experience, or requiring any content to be added to the page itself. It makes me think of the help text that appears onscreen during a game play tutorial, which prompts the user to try certain actions but allows actual play to continue. I’ve been thinking for a while that game tutorials were a help model that libraries should try to emulate. They usually take place in the live game environment, so you don’t have to read a manual before starting to actually play; they just add a level of instruction to the live experience.