tools for research » News

25 Awesome Beta Research Tools from Libraries Around the World & RSS, wonder of the web.

anton — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:20:59 +0000

25 library research tools, posted on collegedegree.com – the best one is #7, just because my partner developed it

Well, actually a bit more than that. She set up an RSS – real simple syndication – feed for new arrivals in the University Library. It is the best way to keep track of lots of different streams of information. Personally I use google reader (o’course) to aggregate all the blogs and web news feeds I read. You may even be using a feed reader to read this! Lots of software can do this for you – mac mail, outlook, firefox… but I prefer the online ones like reader and bloglines.

zoho – offline and online use….

anton — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 22:53:21 +0000

I was thinking about using google documents for my research experiment this semester – using online ‘free’ tools. ars technica had and interesting article about zoho – an online word-processor that syncs with google gears for off-line (god forbid) use. As much as a google-head as I am, I’ll give it a whirl – it seems free, there are no ads… perhaps they are following the same business model as google and charging businesses only. Without mail though, I don’t see it as particularly compelling for them. Zoho and Zotero, sounds exotic.

Experiment 1: software choices made

anton — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 07:50:50 +0000

After a few days thinking and talking to my collegues, I’ve decided on the software I’m going to use for the first experiment: google documents (with google gears for offline help) and zotero all running on Firefox. The first task is going to see if I want to run this portably, using a nice USB key as my repository. This is because its tricky to share zotero between browsers, but I think the zotero server may solve that at some point in the future.

The first problem is I don’t see a Harvard reference style for zotero, and that’s the style I’m expected to use in social sciences here at Otago. I’ve used a hacked version of Harvard in endnote before, so I’ll have to find something similar.

Experiment 1 – open source and on-line.

anton — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:08:27 +0000

Can you do a university course using open source and free online software? I’m going to try to do an entire semester’s work without touching proprietary applications. The goals are:

Interoperability – everyone has to be able to read my work at the end
Cross platform – I should be able to work at a PC _and_ a Mac, though as I’m not working on a linux box ATM I’m not going to test that.

the tools I’ll need are (to begin with);

An editor
biblographical software
notes storage

Any suggestions?