The Main: Things 16 And 17

Kahore he tarainga tahere i te ara

You cannot hew a bird spear by the way

Bird-spear points.  From New Zealand Electronic Text Collection Taken from "The Maori as he was: A brief account of life as it was in the Pre-European Days" By Elsdon Best

Things 16 and 17 are entitled Productivity in research, what this weeks whakatauki alludes to is the need for preparation. Bird spears were not easily made and needed time and skill to be made properly. Productivity can be seen in this whakatauki in the making of the birdspears however I think that an essential part of productivity is preparation.

Reference management tools are a part of that preparation.

I am a fan of folders and sub-folders for organisation, I have stated this in my posts about things  5 and 6 The Hors' douveres  

For reference management I prepare myself firstly by using our own Library Search (Library Catalogue)

by  wlef70 


In Library Search we are able to check due dates, renew our 
books, and see what fines we have . There is more functionality in Library Search which allows us to save items from the catalogue. You are able to save your items in my beloved folders and even sub-folders.  If you wanted to you could also save your searches and set up RSS Feeds. 

"This is all good" I hear you say "but how does this translate into references and reference lists?"

Part of the functionality that I spoke of earlier is an ability to Select items (Click on the boxes next to the item) 

and Push them through to your preferred reference management tool 

I always suggest to first year students that they should start by referencing manually while their essays and assignments  are quite short, this is so that they understand why and how to reference. They also gain an ability to recognise an error in an in-text citation and/or reference list made by a reference management tool. 

I used Endnote and Endnote Web for my MIS (Libs) research report (Yes I know shameless self promotion)

 
 by  Mendeley.com 

I signed up for a RefWorks account as that is the current reference management tool promoted and supported by the UoA, and I also have a Zotero account as well. I don't think that there is one that is better than the other as I think it comes down to personal preference.

Thing 17 hmmm well I have had a look and also signed up for an Evernote account. In our Twitter "Thing" I admitted that  

   by  joe.ross 

I had only just realised what a hash-tag was and how they were used. Evernote, our own library search and a multitude of social media now allow tags/labels/hash-tags which allows the user to label items of interest to them. I have come to think of  hash-tags

by romana klee 


labels  

by Sarah Parrott 

and tags as a very effective access and organisational tool. 

The ability to make your own tags/labels/hash-tags helps to access your current resources and focus further searches. Also if other people have used the same label then you will see their resources as well.

Having multiple tab/label/hash-tags stops you having to decide into which folder a resource most belongs or having multiple copies of the same resource in different folders.

Looking at Evernote I would use the existing notebook structure in the following way

• Each chapter/section of my research would be allocated a Notebook
• Any search including key words and search terms would be noted in the appropriate notebook/s
• Results or the URL for the results would be noted
• Resources of particular interest would be noted
• All notes would be given tags as well as being placed in the appropriate notebook/s
• My own notes from seminars/conferences/courses if not added directly would be scanned, uploaded and allocated appropriate tags and notebook/s

Of course this is just a brief idea of how I would use Evernote in research. I would basically make it the central hub for the resources in my research.

   by  416style 

For more shameless self promotion follow this note from my Evernote account. I will try the personal smart device one a little later.

Still the Hors d'oeuvres

Ooops a bit more on "Thing 5" 

RefWorks

Endnote Web

For management of my readings and articles I used End-note (then RefWorks) because I not only had the references available to me for when I was writing but because you could save documents to the references. In the record of an article I would save a PDF version of it. 

I would also write notes about how I could use the references and attach those to the appropriate record as well. 

Hors d'oeuvres

Ko ia kāhore nei i rapu, tē kitea
"He who does not seek will not find"

Now on to "Thing 5", I was never really sure exactly what and how I would use RSS feeds. I have had a tutu with them using Outlook my work email which allow us to subscribe to RSS feeds, that seems a long time ago and I had not thought about news feeds until this thing. 

So far I think the trick, for me to use social media successfully for research is discipline. I like routine so if I start by allocating time directly after checking emails to blog writing and feed scanning after a short while it will become second nature. 

For management of news and  information I have a love of folders, although I haven't looked at the RSS feeds since I subscribed to them, I still have them organised in folders. I have also organised my bookmarks (in Explorer) into folders and as you can see below, some even have sub-folders (must be the librarian in me)

Before I finish with this "Thing" I wanted to share a page relevant for those who use Google Chrome browser and Feedly. I added the RSS Subscription extension (For Google Chrome browser) a suggestion at the bottom of "thing 5"  and found I had to add Feedly manually to the list of feed readers. Follow the link if you would like to use Feedly with RSS Subscription extension  from the Google Chrome browser. There is also the Feedly mini extension made for Google Chrome browser however I haven't bothered with this one as the instructions to add Feedly to the News reader were quite easy to follow.