Eeeny meeny ... another meltdown

This is terrible. Another flaming can of worms. Don't you people understand how difficult it is for Crail to make decisions?


EndNoteWeb? Mendeley? Zotero?

I have really, really, wanted to use Mendeley, since seeing that charming young gentleman [was that Jan Reichelt?] who demonstrated it last year. Freely available, devised by PhD students, iTunes for references, not dominated by Big Boys, drag and drop for god's sake, pretty colour, what's not to like? Plus in June received notification that they are working with Caret to investigate using it as a repository.... though as Caret admit themselves, a lot of their projects fall by the wayside. However, as long as they drop Connotea that would be a start. Would like to know why Mendeley, which initially received equal billing in 23Things, has dropped down the pecking order. Is this because hardly anyone in the Cambridge libraries is actually using it apart from Isla? Interesting.....

Anyway, yes, back to the point. Some of these Web 2.0 wotsits are interesting, but can be taken or left, without our, er, clients being inconvenienced. But now we are talking reference management systems, and things get more serious. We should promote these tools ergo we have to have a degree of competency in them.

Trouble is, Mendeley doesn't quite work. Same as EndNote. Same, probably, with Zotero.

What is the point in telling PhD students to get organised and park their refs in one of these when it is all such a flippin' FAFF? If I am chucking the toys out of the pram in frustration, one can hardly expect them to stick with it. All that dropping into Notepad and converting to .ris, or dropping into EndNote and then into Mendeley. Why do I have to DO all that?

I hadn't even bothered to look at Zotero until now, more stuff on the Firefox pane, I can resiste anything but temptation etc. But oh heck, I have to confess that clicking that little booky-thing in the search box and having the ref drop in IS fabulously easy ... ergo alarmingly tempting. BUT the Computing Service warns against it for large nos of refs. So now I've got [personal] refs in EndNoteWeb, in Mendeley and in Zotero. Mostly the same ones. More Augean messes.

Ah, life was easy when you just showed the students how to drop from WoK into EndNote. Job done, sidle off before they started asking about the other databases and things got decidedly sticky.....

That's it. I'm propped up at the Hommage a Huysmans and it's only 11 am.

How I learned to stop worrying and embrace Gaga

Here we all are, worrying about how to market our library services. And here we all are, well some of us, fretting about user ed next term ... Problem solved, the answer was right under our noses, thanks to the Passion and the Fury!
Bet some of us were thinking of using 'Librarians do Gaga', hmmmmm? What a brilliant lead in, actually gives us some hooks.
Anyway, people, we can ditch the Twitter, the RSS feeds, the FaceBook pages, it's all redundant. Miss Crail has had a vision.
Knock 'em dead in user ed!
Start the vid, right? Start talking earnestly about how there will be a 2-hour session with a test at the end... Then OFF come the tweeds [I'm thinking Buck's Fizz .... And obviously one must plan to wear clean and moderately supportive underwear], ON goes the white wig, and then ... we start to mime and do the moves.
Imagine their little faces!
Doesn't matter if we're crap, in fact crapper the better. Doesn't matter if we collapse in a drunken heap part way through [and god knows, most of us will need a few gins beforehand] - so much the better! I'm serious.


Kevin Spacey. American Beauty. That perfect line -
'Something tells me you'll remember me this time'

....Oh oh uh-oh-woh, oh oh uh-oh-woh....


[Apologies to those who don't get the Buck's Fizz reference. Eurovision Song Contest, 1981. Britain's finest contribution to that famed pantheon of the Arts. Say no more. And sorry there are no more appropriate pictures. Flickr's not quite apposite here. But probably best you use your imagination anyway.........]