I think I'm in love

This is awful. I think I am in love with Zotero, and I've only been stepping out with Mendeley for 10 months.
I am usually quite good at breaking things but I cannot find anything wrong with Zotero. But come on, there has to be a catch.
Cut and paste the ISBN, DOI and the ref appears! That is bordering on sorcery.
Please will someone enlighten me, tell me it makes Word explode or whatever, before I go skipping off into the sunset and do something silly.

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.