#CPD23 Thing 14: Managing the Sea of Information

Creative Commons License by Walt Stoneburner

Thing 14 of the 23 Things for Professional Development program discusses Zotero and other bibliographic citation tools. I have long since been a fan of Zotero, a Firefox extension that has made my research life so much easier. Up until about a year ago, Zotero was a tool that I used personally. I would boast its helpful effectiveness to anyone that would listen (or if it happened to come up during a reference question), but for the most part, it was something I used to keep track of my research while in my Masters program. Most recently, a colleague of mine and I formed a private Zotero group to share sources that we will use for an upcoming conference presentation, this being my first Zotero collaboration project.

Since becoming a librarian within higher ed, I have had the opportunity to teach an Information Literacy course each quarter, and I have shown Zotero to students during the last few weeks of the course. It has been a bit frustrating because my institution uses internet explorer like it's the greatest browser of all time - [sigh... that's a post for another day], and I found out that portable Firefox won't work for student accounts (so my bringing in flash drives with portable Firefox and Zotero installed didn't work either unless I was logged in as myself). Since that fiasco, I have been using diigo with great success. While it has nothing to do with citing sources, it does help keep research organized.

So back to my initial comment about Zotero being a tool for personal use...

As I was reading the post for this "thing," one comment stuck with me. Isla Kuhn stated, "managing information ..., and helping others to do so too demonstrates our worth in a new way, and is a very useful skill. We’re not just there to help people find information, we can help them manage it to more easily achieve their goal." This key point is something I haven't thought of before, but Kuhn is absolutely right! The tools that we use personally, can surely benefit the library population, be it students or patrons, in a significant way. Helping people manage the information they find is just as important as helping them to find the credible information in the first place (and by doing so, we boost our resumes with new skill sets and tools to boot).

So far during this post, I have discussed Zotero, but there were two other citation organization tools that were discussed for this "thing." Mendeley is one that I have looked into in the past, but I never wanted to download it to give it a try. Zotero has worked so well for me that I haven't wanted to dive into something different (if it 'aint broke...don't fix it). But, this "thing" has me digging deeper to find pros and cons of using Mendeley over Zotero.

*Jennifer Vinopal of Library Sphere sees Mendeley as being beneficial due to the academic networking options available. Additionally, the citation cross-referencing features provides a collaborative research atmosphere, in my mind similar to what delicious created with collaborative bookmarking.
*Jodi Schneider wrote in 2009 with hopes that Mendeley would eventually integrate with Zotero. It seems Mendeley heard the plea and the desktop application now offers the ability to import your Zotero library. Schneider also mentioned the 1 point that has always made me hesitate to move solely to this platform - Mendeley really only provides a way to organize pdf files. I'm not sure this is enough for my research endeavors.
*Aaron Tay of Musings of Librarianship also provided an excellent write-up comparing EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero, and Wizfolio. Excellent post I tell you...excellent!

Perhaps this exploration is the push I have needed to give Mendeley a real try. I have it downloaded and will give it an honest trial run...but I still must say that Zotero is so easy! It's easy to learn, easy to teach (even with the hiccups I mentioned above), and easy to use all the way around.

The last citation tool discussed was CiteULike. Kuhn describes this tool as being similar to delicious, but with "articles, rather than websites." While this seems like a good option, especially for my students, I find the interface to be clunky. There's no bookmarklet (to my knowledge) which would make it easy to import items into the CiteULike library, but because it is web-based with no download necessary, it would be easy to access your library at any time, on any computer. I suppose there are pros and cons to every system.

For now, I'm still leaning towards Zotero. I'd like to hear from you too - what's your favorite citation tool?