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.

Time, or the lack of it...

Ah, yes, LibraryThing. Getting in a bit of a panic, Thursday evening, the 'Crossroads' 140-DVD megaset still only 25% watched ... and no homework done. Beginning to wish I was flippin' Tithonus, ergo must be going mad. Quickly added a few of the vast Crail collection of homemaking manuals to LibraryThing [after the embarrassing discovery YET AGAIN that there was a pre-existing account, dormant and erased from memory], then hit a hiatus. Where in the Library [spoken a la Celia Johnson in 'Brief Encounter'] have the Fanny Cradock masterpieces gone? ... Then gave up.

Workwise, anything remotely related to cataloguing starts an attack of the guilts, as well as an agitated grab for the gin. Having to assign shelf locations to books I don't even have in front of me, Victorian and Edwardian books with helpful titles like 'My country garden' and 'Waftings of a wanderer', and LibraryThing is usually lined up on the tabs along with Google books, OpenLibrary [which I like playing with to see which phrase it comes up with when it hasn't got details of a book - Good grief? Shucky darn? Cor blimey?], Botanicus, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Internet Archive, the cataloguing resorts of the desperate. Using LibraryThing for books that few individuals or libraries still own [but probably lots of thrift stores and Oxfam Shops do ... and the Plant Sciences Library at Cambridge] has made me think more than once 'I really ought to add some of the stuff we have here to this. There must be bibliophiles out there who really do want to know about 'Daffodils I have loved''. That isn't a joke, more a pathetic attempt not to face up to the knowledge that the Plant Sciences Library could make a useful contribution to LibraryThing. But GAWD, we are talking Augean Stables. Where's Rumplestiltskin when you need him? Oops, wrong story. But there's no point in doing this on a professional level unless it's done properly. And once again I'm a bit concerned about all these little ... deposits ... I'm excreting on the web.

On a personal level, LibraryThing is a lovely resource, a wonderful community for proper bibliophiles, people who actually make it to book clubs every week and bring lemon drizzle cake and home-made gooseberry wine with them. LibraryThing has that sort of, I don't know, warm feeling about it. Just the sort of thing a mentally-anal but physically-middenlike person like me would enjoy doing and benefit from. And let's face it, you cannot get much more anal than a field for entering start and end reading dates. It's comforting to know that however schlocky the paperback owned, there appear to be hundreds of other people out there who not only own it, but have earnestly reviewed it. If I had plenty of time I would have enormous fun participating. But who on earth has? [Helpful comments about time speeding up as one gets older not required, thank you] Dare to allow oneself a breather from catching up with others' blogs [abandoned for a couple of days not because it is a chore, but because thought is required, and more avenues are opened up by all those clever people who do the tasks properly] and Google reader admonishes sternly that 'more than 180 items' are available for contemplation. Dash to the Hommage a Huysmans minibar. Hmmm, Wincarnis or Sanatogen?

Anyway, excuses over, got to gird up the loins [and we'll be needing something with reinforced whatebone or possibly steel plates] for next week's can of worms, Facebook, and the cherry bomb Phil Bradley has dropped http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2010/06/google-facebook-faceoff.html Sometimes that boy needs his legs smacked.

Gentleman's Third?

Never, ever, think 'Oh I seem to be catching up with things [or Things]'. Because then comes the stern dictat that we must blog about everything, and we mustn't say 'Done that'.
Oh here we go, Crail hasn't done her English homework and is in detention again 'In Henry IV Part II, the linguistic construction of hegemonistic praxis functions as the conceptual frame for the discourse of power. Discuss, with examples. In French.'
Right, haven't blogged about Thing 2. Have done it, because the instructions made it easy. NOW I have to try to construct one myself, unpicking XML, not 'hit this button'. Bit of fun. Watch this space. Well, don't, and don't hold your breath.
Thing 4. What the heck do I say? OF COURSE I've done it or Miss Crail wouldn't be listed up there. And yes, I have read and responded to other blogs, a great and naughty pleasure when thanks to Thing 8, I now have to revise all the subject headings for all 45,019,237 books in the Crail Empire [possibly a slight exaggeration], the sun is actually shining, and the Kings College May Ball looks as if it has DODGEMS. I'd just poured myself a gin and tonic too, from the library art installation 'Hommage a Huysmans', and lit a Passing Cloud.
Other Cam23ers' blogs are fantastic, funny, erudite, thought-provoking, and Sarah's YouTube compilation makes us all look clever. I know some people have complained about the lack of flexibility of the templates, but as someone who has wasted months sweating over the design of webpages, and then resorted to templates in despair, I can only say, that even the least design-savvy of us can knock up something reasonable, so thanks for that.
There, done it, will that do?