Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Educators

Certain librarianish tendencies seem to have stuck for good, despite the fact that I don’t work in a library any more.

Wanting to structure data about publishing/presenting by members of my department’s faculty, I quickly grew rustrated with RefWorks because it doesn’t do NLM citations properly and it doesn’t even have a Ref Type for Presentations. (My view, by the way, is that it is false advertising for RefWorks to claim that it supports NLM. It doesn’t. Not correctly and not thoroughly.)

So I started again looking at Zotero, which I dreaded. The last time I tried it, I found it frustrating and quickly gave up.

This time, though, I had a secret weapon: Jason Puckett. Jason is a friend and I knew he was a sharp and terribly nice guy with great taste- but I had no idea how good his book was.

Jason’s book, Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Educators is outstanding. I’m a fussy critic of writing, but I loved Jason’s. The structure of the book is simple, the writing is clear and friendly. This book got me up to speed on Zotero much faster than if I’d just relied on the documentation and my own experimentation.

Thanks to this quick start, I discovered that Zotero is far more powerful than RefWorks and accomplishes much more in far less time.

If you ever were curious about Zotero, get the book and start playing with it. If you’re a RefWorks user, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much more powerful Zotero is while still being pretty darn easy to use.

ALA Folks: You can buy a DRM-Free version here.

Medical Libraryfolk: I’m curious. What are your favorite tools for managing bibliographic data? Really, please let me know in the comments or drop me an email. I want to manage the data of all publishing/presentation done by members of our faculty and I’d welcome suggestions of what tools to try.

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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
By James Gleick

Okay, I admit I’m already reading this one- and LOVING it.  Gleick (who also wrote a great biography of Richard Feynman), writes in a fascinating, engaging way about the history of information and of information technology.  This book wonderfully illuminates how we got where we are and provides hints at where we might be going.

I would like a stack of 20 copies, please, so I can give one to each of my favorite 20 technology-resistant librarians.

Check out these reviews.

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An Introduction to Research for Health Librarians
By Barbara Sen

This looks like one I’d love to read- and it is being released in May.

“This step-by-step guide provides encouragement, support, and direction for health librarians who may be new to research and evaluation or lacking in confidence or expertise. With a focus on practice-based research, evaluation, and small projects, it guides the reader through the research process, from starting to think about the research question, through to the completion of the research and dissemination of the results. It is designed to encourage quality research from library professionals and encourage them to add to the evidence base in this sector. This timely collection considers methods and approaches that are suitable in a health library context, making it a useful tool for health library professionals and students alike.”

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Evidence-Based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach it
By Sharon E. Straus MD, Paul Glasziou MRCGP FRACGP PhD, W. Scott Richardson MD, R. Brian Haynes MD

This one was released in December, but I haven’t gotten to it yet- and I’ve been instructed quite sternly to read everything Sharon Strauss writes.

“Evidence Based Medicine provides a clear explanation of the central questions: how to ask answerable clinical questions; how to translate them into effective searches for the best evidence; how to critically appraise that evidence for its validity and importance; and how to integrate it with patients’ values and preferences.”

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Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide
By Jessamyn C. West

Rachel Walden taught me what a “librarian crush” is, and I have had a librarian crush on Jessamyn since I saw these signs.

Teaching novice computer users, including seniors and individuals with disabilities such as low vision or motor skills, how to do what they want and need to do online is a formidable challenge for library staff. Part inspirational, part practical Without a/the Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide is a summary of techniques, approaches, and skills that will help librarians meet this challenge.

Jessamyn C. West’s experience as a librarian is deeply immersed in technology culture, yet living in rural America makes her uniquely qualified to write this book. Taking a big-picture approach to the subject, she demystifies and simplifies tech training for the busy librarian, providing an easy-to-use handbook full of techniques that can be used with all of a library’s many populations. As an added bonus, she also examines the players in the library technology arena to offer firsthand reports on what works, what doesn’t, and what’s next.

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The Atlas of New Librarianship

Libraries have existed for millennia, but today the library field is searching for solid footing in an increasingly fragmented (and increasingly digital) information environment. What is librarianship when it is unmoored from cataloging, books, buildings, and committees? In The Atlas of New Librarianship, R. David Lankes offers a guide to this new landscape for practitioners. He describes a new librarianship based not on books and artifacts but on knowledge and learning; and he suggests a new mission for librarians: to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities.

The vision for a new librarianship must go beyond finding library-related uses for information technology and the Internet; it must provide a durable foundation for the field. Lankes recasts librarianship and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge is created though conversation. New librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation; they seek to enrich, capture, store, and disseminate the conversations of their communities.

To help librarians navigate this new terrain, Lankes offers a map, a visual representation of the field that can guide explorations of it; more than 140 Agreements, statements about librarianship that range from relevant theories to examples of practice; and Threads, arrangements of Agreements to explain key ideas, covering such topics as conceptual foundations and skills and values. Agreement Supplements at the end of the book offer expanded discussions. Although it touches on theory as well as practice, the Atlas is meant to be a tool: textbook, conversation guide, platform for social networking, and call to action.

[More here]

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What new books are you reading or looking forward to?

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When I was born, my father (an IBM programmer) used some cutting-edge computer technology to make my birth announcements. See images below.

¹

How did he use these? He made birth announcements on 96-column punch cards in which the punches spelled out the word “BOY.”

In 1972, here’s what the cutting-edge of MEDLINE looked like to most users:

According the NLM’s Janet Zipser, MEDLINE was the first remote access, real-time database in existence. By the end of 1972 about 150 libraries had access to MEDLINE® all at medical schools and research facilities. The rate was $6/hour, a 4-fold reduction over direct dial. The highest speed available was 30 characters/second. Most people had 10 characters/second Texas Instrument Silent 700s.

Please understand how amazingly fast people thought 30 characters/second was. Please also understand how that compares to today’s speeds:

And now PubMed is available to everyone with an internet connection…for free. Anna Kushnir-type gripes aside, this is amazing.

I looked at what storage memory cost circa 1979:

Compare that to the flash drive I keep in my pocket at most times:

The IBM 3340 Direct Access Storage Facility was introduced in March 1973 …Two, three or four 3340 drives could be attached to the IBM System/370 Model 115 processor — which had been announced concurrently with the 3340 — providing a storage capacity of up to 280 million bytes.

In order to match the storage capacity of my flash drive, this is how many IBM 3340s you’d need:

In order to match the storage capacity of the laptop I was using at the time, this is how many IBM 3340s you’d need:

xkcd put it nicely:

iTunes, as far as I can tell, has over 11 Million tracks.

But what brought this all to mind was something I stumbled across via PopURLs the other day:

http://i.imgur.com/y2Rurl.jpg

We live in the future.

[EDIT]

Via Joe (http://friendfeed.com/jokrausdu), here’s what 200 MB looked like in 1970:

200 MBs in 1970

[/EDIT]

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It was lots of fun and a treat for me to get to leave Syracuse in January and gape at palm trees for a couple of days.

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[via: http://liblog.mayo.edu/2009/10/13/video-tutorial-my-ncbi-custom-filters-and-sharing-collections/]

Melissa rules.

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“This blog has been created to share PubMed search strategies. Search strategies posted here are not perfect. They are posted in the hope that others will benefit from the work already put into their creation and/or will offer suggestions for improvements. Librarians who wish to post comments on this blog or who wish to become authors are invited to e-mail me.”

Example post shown below:

[via: Melissa Rethlefsen and Mark Rabnett]

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What New Users Should Know
(How is Quertle® different?)

1. Find true relationships, not simple co-occurrences
On Quertle, if you search for two or more terms, you will find documents in which those terms occur in a conceptual relationship, not simply scattered within the same document. You won’t always find as many, but you weren’t really going to read 14,578 documents, were you?

2. Quertle understands biology and chemistry
Quertle understands the difference between “TWIST”, the helix-loop-helix transcription factor, and “twist”, the verb. So, use proper capitalization in your query, and you won’t be lost in a sea of irrelevant results.

3. Power Terms™ enable you to query for categories of objects
Use Power Terms™ to query for categories of objects, such as any protein or chemical (not simply the occurrence of the terms). See the Power Terms™ link under the query box for further instructions and the list of currently-supported Power Terms™. Use them; we’ll know what they mean. Want other Power Terms™? Let us know.

4. Useful help
Throughout the site, mouse over the (?) to see helpful hints. To answer many of your other questions, such as why there appear to be duplicate results, please read the Help and FAQ documents (links at the bottom of the page).

Things to look for on the Results page (check the (?) hints on that page):
a. More relevant results
b. Easy filtering and breadcrumb tracking
c. Key concepts automatically identified for you, including members of any Power Term™ categories used in your query

I definitely like the highlighting of search terms and the terms Quertle sees as synonymous:

I like the refinement tools to the right of search results:

It bothers me a bit that Quertle doesn’t actually identify who created or maintains it:

Who is behind Quertle?
Quertle has been created by biomedical scientists, chemists, and linguistic experts, who have many decades of experience with research and finding relevant information to support that research.

Since Quertle is essentially doing keyword searches, its power would be significantly improved if it supported Boolean operators.

Librarians, be sure to check out the Power Terms™. Currently-supported terms are listed here- what others would you like to see?

For more, see Quertle’s Help page.

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The Mayo Clinic Libraries’ Liblog has a screencast by Melissa Rethlefsen on PubMed’s new Advanced Search features that you can embed on your own page:

In case I have not mentioned it recently: Melissa is awesome.

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(Embedded below is a video about CUE. If you are reading this post via a feed reader, you may need to visit the site to view the video.)

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Lately, Lei has been posting “Find It Fast!” video tutorials on the blog he writes for the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at the Yale University School of Medicine. These are great and are available as streaming flash or as an .m4v download (suitably sized for viewing on a portable device!).

The most recent ones, The Clinical Question and The Pyramid of Resources aren’t just useful to clinicians- they would make wonderful instructional tools for new medical libraryfolk, too.

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