Thing 14: Zotero/Mendeley/citeulike

I was pleased to see this Thing come up, because I'd been meaning to investigate these tools for a while - not so much on my own behalf but for our users (postgraduate students and researchers). They do regularly ask questions about reference management etc and frankly it's about time I got up to speed! I can pass as a digital native in most areas but I have to admit I really haven't got my head around using technology to do bibliographic referencing yet...

I'm hoping to create a user guide to social media/free web 2.0 tools soon and would like to feature Zotero and Mendeley quite prominently, so my main challenge with this Thing is not just learning to use the tools but also figuring out how to explain them to others. I suspect a training session/visual demonstration would be clearer here than a written guide, but I'm not sure I'd be able/allowed to offer this at the moment.

First step - download Zotero plugin. This was pretty easy as I'm already using Firefox at work and happily my permissions allowed the plugin. Registering my account and setting up sync preferences was slightly more alarming at first glance (there's about a billion options on the preferences menu) but in practice quick and easy too. The interface of the 'library' itself is fairly generic and simple, although as with any new toy, if you're used to creating/managing your citations manually this is a bit of a leap in terms of workflow. But a worthwhile one I'm convinced. Putting myself in the shoes of our users, I don't think they'd have too many problems here - as long as they use Firefox!

Next - Mendeley. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to use this at work as it's a desktop download, and I was on tenterhooks (tragic I know) as I slowly worked through all the installation steps. But finally it worked. Another new interface to get used to... I can't quite bring myself to try it out until I have some real PDFs/references to organise, as it feels like too much hard work just for testing purposes. But again, it seems relatively intuitive and since everyone I know who uses it raves about it, I'm sure our students would benefit.

One thing I'm not quite sure about with these tools is the social/sharing aspect - if you can attach full-text PDFs to your library and then share them in the cloud, isn't that, um, potentially illegal? Or do just the citations get shared, not the actual documents? I'm all for open access but we're not quite there yet, legally, are we? [Ok, confused and copyright-paranoid librarian bit over.]

Citeulike, as Isla says in her post, isn't quite the same deal, being more of a stand-alone organise-n-share website than a full reference management kit. I like it though - it's clean and simple and just wants to be Delicious for academic researchers. I would probably recommend it to our users, although I don't know if it really offers anything not already provided by other sites.

I definitely have more work to do here on applying these tools in real life, but since I'm nearly on holiday it might have to wait!

Photo by Barbara.K on Flickr