Research Management [Updated]

I had been planning to give a workshop to students early in the spring semester about free, web-based tools for organizing research notes, citations, and links--all those things one accumulates when working on an academic paper or project.

I struck out with Zotero as I wrote in this post because it only works in Firefox 2. In the same post, I noted that EndNote Web wasn't quite working for this purpose either (although I went ahead and wrote a review, mostly because I told people in my workplace that I would and some did find it useful).

To find more tools to look at, I used these two posts from Solution Watch:

• Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 1
• Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 2

I found interesting things to look at, but nothing I wanted to offer a workshop on. Many of the tools were note-taking tools in the sense that you take your laptop to class and take notes with it, not in the sense of making notes for a project. Since our campus is not fully wireless, a web-based tool for class notes is not something my students can use consistently.

I looked at Studicious and found the note-taking features much to rudimentary for my purposes. And it took several tries to figure out how the grade-keeping feature worked. You put down the assignments at the beginning of the semester, then insert the grades as they are received. The software does all the calculations which is pretty cool, but not that exciting by itself. I couldn't make the Friends feature work at all--perhaps my "Friends" need Studicious accounts as well as Facebook ones.

Notecentric is WYSYWIG. It's purpose is for sharing classroom notes. This might be useful for some campuses, but not ours (yet). It couldn't really be used for making project notes because there seems to be no way to not share notes with this tool. Every note you make is shared with everyone who signs up as belonging to the same class. [Update: I enabled comments this morning and received my first this afternoon--a correction from the developer that Notecentric does facilitate private notes.]

Backpack seems like a good possibility. But I couldn't remember how many pages you get with the free account. And I didn't want to create a new one, since I know I made one a year or so ago. If it's five, however, that might work well for students--one page for each class where the student can store notes, images, calendars, to do lists, and links. Unlike the other tools, this one is more general--not aimed at students, specifically.

mynoteIT has a WYSYWIG editor, a calendar for assignments, to do lists, and the ability to make things either private or public. This was probably the best of the lot, but since I hadn't heard about it before, I was a bit afraid to trust it. Will it be here for the whole next semester? What happens if I teach students about it in January and they lose the site and all their notes in April?

Fortunately, at about this stage in my explorations, another librarian came up with an idea for a workshop. I gave her my time slot and I'll wait until summer to see if any of these tools strike me as being ready for prime time and something I want to tell students about in the fall.

Labels: instruction, reviews

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