Are You A Bibliography Nut?

Michael E. Smith posted on his blog that he has 18,000 bibliographic references in his EndNote database! Which got me wondering, how do others stack up?  Anyone got him beat? Have you actually read everything in your bibliographic file, or do you, like Smith, add things you “are likely to use”?

I have an interest in the technicalities of scholarly workflow, so I love to read blog posts like this that track the technological changes that have shaped a scholar’s workflow over decades:

It all started early in graduate school, when Clark Erickson showed me his library card catalog drawers full of references written on 3×5 index cards. How cool was that! I immediately started my own program of price supports for the index card manufacturers. Clark and I would make cards for each other when we came across appropriate references. I think I had between 15,000 and 20,000 cards in all. In the 1980s I got up to 1,000 or so citations into the Minark database. What a klunker! OK for very early PC days, I guess, but I soon switched to a bibliography program (I forget which one).

I think I had a Filemaker Pro database for citations on my Mac laptop in the late 1990s, and I definitely remember when my classmate pioneered an early version of EndNote in the department (I think this was about 1999).  I currently use EndNote, RefWorks, and Zotero, though none of them heavily.  But plenty of scholars – from undergraduates to faculty members – still use pieces of paper or Word documents to keep lists of citations. How does a citation management program affect the way scholars work? If you have 18,000 references in a database, are you more or less likely to turn up the right article for the project at hand? I don’t know that anyone’s studied this, and I can’t really conceive how one would do so quantitatively, but I find it as interesting as the transition (or not) from print to digital texts for scholarly work.

RefWorks for Classicists Workshop

This is obviously of most interest to my readers actually located in Athens, GA!  Here’s the content from the flyer:

RefWorks for Classicists
A workshop on bibliographic & citation management software.

• When: Wednesday, Sept. 22, 4:30-5:30pm
• Where: Park Hall 149
• Who: interested Classics Graduate Students, Undergraduates, and Faculty.
• Why:  Manage information, save time & effort

Bibliographic management software allows you to export citations from library catalogs or article databases, store the citations and .pdfs of articles in a database and make notes on them, and insert citations in your Word documents.  UGA has site licenses for RefWorks and EndNote; there are others free on the web (Zotero, Mendeley, etc.)

This workshop will focus on setting up a RefWorks account, working with the most common sources for Classics, and issues and concerns related to Classics (i.e. European-style titles, Greek fonts).  If you’d like to work with me to learn EndNote, please email pacheson@uga.edu and I will be happy to meet with you one on one or in a small group.

Trying to decide between RefWorks and EndNote?  See the chart below and also http://www.libs.uga.edu/citeman/index.html

RefWorks

1. Web-based, only available when you are online.
2. Your citations and pdfs are available on any computer with internet.
3. No need to download new versions / software patches: seamless updates.
4. Can attach up to 500 MB of files to citations.
5. RSS feed reader and storage built in (great for repeating searches at set intervals).
6. Interface for PDA/smartphones.
7. Works more seamlessly with L’Annee Philologique.

EndNote

1. Software you download to a computer, so can be used when you are not online.
2. Your citations and pdfs are stored in a document (.enl file, a “library”), so using multiple computers requires planning ahead & a thumb drive.
3. Yearly and more frequent releases of software updates which you may install to keep current.
4. Can attach unlimited amount of files to citations for archival purposes.
5. New optional Endnote Web makes citations more portable.

Both: support Unicode for Greek characters, work well with exports from most article databases and library catalogs, offer many formatting choices for bibliographies, support plug-ins for Microsoft Word that allow seamless citation insertion in documents, and with with Macs as well as PCs.

On Information Management

When I started this blog a couple of months ago, and created an accompanying twitter account (which, I know, I am not using much yet, sorry), I didn’t realize I would be adding the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of Too Much Information. But in addition to remembering yet another username and password, I am now struggling with keeping up with both producing content and consuming content online.  Disentangling the private and professional online is also a bit of a mess in my head right now.   So I’m starting a blog-project on information management that I hope will help me define things a bit, and will also help me better serve the faculty and students I work with, who are probably facing many of the same problems.

Here’s where I stand as a content producer/distributor:

I have one Facebook account, that is mostly an expression of my private life (i.e. I interact(ed) socially in real life with almost all of my Facebook friends).  But since many of my ‘friends’ are current or former coworkers, or former fellow-students, I also have a dimension of my professional life on Facebook.

I have two twitter accounts (@phoebeacheson and @classicslib), and contribute to a group account (@ugalibsref).  I am most muddled about what is personal and what is professional in this arena right now.

I have three blogs: this one, a private personal one, and a public one that is rather boring unless you are deeply excited by plumbing and gardening.  I have also been invited to contribute to the Ancient World Bloggers’ Group (though have not done so yet) and I contribute to the UGA Library blog.  Here my boundaries and scopes are delightfully clear. Whew.

I also recently set up an academia.edu page, and am on Linkedin (not very actively).  I explored Connotea a couple of years ago, and my account is still there.  Did I mention I have four email addresses?

Offline, I have published one article as a librarian so far (okay, that’s online too, but the sent me paper offprints! I marveled), and just last Friday gave my first presentation at a small regional conference (Atlanta Area BIG 2010).

In terms of content consumption, I subscribe to 8 professional email list-servs (aside from ones limited to my workplace), and read around 80 work-related blogs (it’s hard to say exactly, as I only have one Google Reader account and also sometimes it’s hard to decide what is personal and what is professional – is Language Log or Uncertain Principles something I read because I enjoy them personally, because they inform my work (they don’t, directly, but do get me thinking…), or both?) I continually feel like I’m not keeping up in some areas, but I also feel like I’m devoting too much time to this sort of keeping up as it is.

I don’t do nearly as much original research as active scholars in Classics do, but I have both a RefWorks account and an EndNote library (the latter really only so I can teach it to others; I use RefWorks for my research projects) and keep meaning to do something with Zotero.

Note I haven’t mentioned non-internet methods of acquiring and distributing information, like talking to colleagues, teaching classes and one-on-one sessions, browsing the stacks of the library, and keeping up with print periodicals.  I do almost all of those, too.

Am I managing all this well?  In terms of consumption, am I finding what I need and keeping up with areas I am most interested in, while weeding out irrelevant-to-me information?  In terms of production, am I reaching my target audience (have I defined a target audience?) with the information and messages I want to convey?  Am I useful to my target audience?  How can I tell?

To further my thinking in these areas I’m going to start having a series of conversations with scholars – hopefully people of different generations who are in different places in their careers – about how they manage information related to their scholarly work and identity.  With their permission, I’ll write up accounts of our chats and post them here, in hopes that I can start answering some of these questions for myself, and help those around me solve any information management problems they may be having.