April 29th, 2004 Stewart
Here’s the PowerPoint presentation I’m using for Roswell Park Cancer Institute to demonstrate Term Manager in brief. It isn’t locked down, so feel free to make copies for your own use or to print handouts from it.
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April 26th, 2004 Stewart
Another article finally made its way to press, this one being an invited column for MRSQ on my experience dealing with Millennials.
I’m also working on a second Millennials article, an overview of instructional techniques in information literacy training for Mils, that I hope to submit for publication later this year.
I’m a little irritated with the Haworth folks, who seem to have mucked up the spelling of “Millenials” (sic) in the title page info on their web site. I hope the printed copy isn’t similarly misspelled or people looking for information on teaching Mils may never find my article.
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April 25th, 2004 Stewart
Last week the HSL hosted our first Mobile Computing in Healthcare Fair, which was attended by a dozen vendors and over 250 registrants — a pretty sucessful show, to my mind. Most noteworthy vendor had to be Motion Computing, whose TabletPC platform is about as innovative a piece of hardware as I’ve seen in some time. If you’re shopping for a new laptop, you should check this out first.
May is always a busy month for me and it looks like this year will prove no exception. Along with two annual conferences, I also have a two-day writing retreat, about half-a-dozen workshops, and my usual workload to boot. I usually start out dreading all the meetings, then end up going and actually having a really good time.
This week, I have to teach two EndNote sessions and one Reference Manager workshop, take my final in MHI 502, and finish the edits for my JMLA article.
Also, a little later on this week, I’m going to make some additions and changes to this site, beefing up the content for users of bibliographic software and for people interested in my workshops. More to come…
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April 11th, 2004 Stewart
I just completed my preparations for my new Reference Manager 10 workshop, including drafting a 20-page handout and designing 3.5 hours of course content and notes. Which is excellent timing on my part, since Ref Man 11 just came out a couple of weeks ago.
I can begin to see it, at least — why someone might have a preference for this particular bibliographic management package instead of, say, ProCite. With the addition of Web publishing to ver. 11, that preference becomes even clearer.
That said, I still really prefer EndNote. The user interface is superior, it comes with about 300 more styles built in (not to mention 250 some-odd MS Word templates) and the search interface is more intuitive and functional. Frankly, neither program really takes full advantage of Z39.50 protocols, or comes with a decent spellchecker, but for just getting my papers written and out the door, EndNote would take the prize.
I still need to investigate Biblioscape in more detail, however.
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April 4th, 2004 Stewart
Just got word back from the editor at the Journal of the Medical Library Association, and if I get my changes into him before the end of the month, I can expect my article to be included in the October 2004 issue. This is a really big deal for me, as this will be my first article to appear in the premier journal of my field, and only my second single-authored, peer reviewed article overall. The article analyzes the navigational structures of 41 academic health sciences library web sites, and I’ve been working on it for three years now.
The reviewers really seemed to like the article, too, even though my findings were pretty dated. I spidered the web sites back in 2001, took most of 2002 to analyze the results, and wrote the paper in 2003. Oh yeah, I was a whirlwind on getting this one done. They liked my writing and research on the whole though, and I’m really pleased to see this one finally being published.
On the down side, though, my Oklahoma State Cowboys just ended their winning streak tonight. I was glad to see them make it all the way to the Final Four, but disappointed that Eddie Sutton, one of the grand old gentlemen of this sport, has yet to see a national championship victory. Maybe next year…
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April 3rd, 2004 Stewart
I get asked a lot of “nuts and bolts” questions about using bibliographic management software and conducting library research, and I thought I would start posting some of the more interesting ones here.
Yesterday, a customer e-mailed me to ask about merging EndNote Libraries. The instructions I walked him through are pretty simple, using the Import feature to merge one Library into another. Before you begin, I recommend making backup copies of the Libraries you plan to merge.
Open the Library you wish to use. Then, go to “File –> Import…” and your Import dialog box will appear. Click the “Choose File” button and select the Library you want to merge with your open Library.
Set your Import Option to “EndNote Library,” leave Duplicates set to “Import All,” and leave Text Translation set to “No Translation.” Click the Import button and your records will be merged.
After merging, use “References –> Find Duplicates” to remove duplicate records. You might need to adjust your Duplicates search parameters under “Edit –> Preferences.” Once you are comfortable that the merger has been successful and that the duplicates have been removed, you can delete your backup Libraries.
Why not use the Duplicates feature in the Import dialog? Well, my own preference is for using Find Duplicates and then eyeballing the references to ensure that duplicative information is being removed. If duplicates are removed for me, or sent to a separate Library, this would be nearly impossible to do. If a Library is particularly large and is filled with references from different databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane, etc.), then I might take a couple of “passes” at it with Find Duplicates, using the Preferences to change my search parameters on each pass.
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