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The first 'Innovations in Reference Management' (IRM10) event was held on 14 January 2010, organised and hosted by the JISC funded TELSTAR project, which is based at the Open University.
Despite the heavy snow that almost brought the UK to a standstill in early January, the event went ahead and was very well attended with about 50 delegates from across the UK making the journey to the Kent's Hill Conference Centre in Milton Keynes for the day.
IRM10 brought together those interested in the use of reference management tools in innovative and interesting ways. It was attended by users and developers of a wide range of different products, and covered a diverse range of topics from real-time impact metrics to digital preservation.
The day opened with an introduction from Niall Sclater, Director of Learning and Innovation at the Open University. As well as describing the Open University context, Niall touched on how the HE sector was seeing increasing interest in moving services such as email, calendaring, blogs, wikis from institutional platforms to 'cloud' based providers such as Google Apps Education edition and Microsoft Live@Edu. This was to prove a theme that would be touched on several times throughout the day.
Staying with the work of the Open University, Owen Stephens and Jason Platts, the Project Manager and Lead Technical Developer from the TELSTAR project followed Niall. The TELSTAR project has been focussing on how citations and good practice in reference management can be facilitated within the institutional learning environment. TELSTAR has integrated the RefWorks bibliographical management software with the Moodle VLE platform, enabling those authoring course material to capture references with RefWorks and present them within a course website hosted on Moodle. Students can copy these references into their own RefWorks account, which they can access within the Moodle environment through the MyReferences module also developed by TELSTAR.
Paul Stainthorp from the University of Lincoln had also been exploiting RefWorks to provide a new service for library users. Paul showed that by using Yahoo Pipes, an online platform that enables you to aggregate and remix content from multiple sources, he could combine lists of books entered into RefWorks accounts by library staff with information about books from Amazon. The result was an impressive 'new titles' application which listed new books acquired by the library, along with cover images, descriptions and links to the University's OPAC as well as to a wide range of online services such as Google Books and LibraryThing.
Taking the event up to lunch was a fascinating presentation on the role of web preservation in 'sustainable citation'. Richard Davis and Kevin Ashley from the University of London Computing Centre's Digital Archives department described how the increased use of web based resources in academia creates a huge challenge in ensuring those resources that are cited continue to be accessible in the medium to long term. Richard and Kevin made a persuasive argument that the issues around preservation of academic web resources are real and immediate, and described several pieces of work in the area including the ArchivesPress project, the UK Web Archive, and the concept of a 'Citation Repository' such as the Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS) at the University of Heidelberg.
After lunch Euan Adie from the Nature Publishing group (NPG) kicked off the afternoon with a demonstration of 'Help me Igor' and other innovations from NPG. 'Help me Igor' is an add-on for Google Wave, a collaboration environment from Google. The 'Help me Igor' robot can be added to a 'wave' (collaborative document) and will respond to certain keywords to look up and insert citations from sources such as PubMed and Connotea. Euan stressed that this development was not intended as a real service, but to demonstrate the potential of an interactive and collaborative environment like Wave to the world of scholarly communication. Alongside this impressive proof-of-concept Euan also showed other developments from NPG for mobile working and scholarly blogging.
In the afternoon there was a shift of focus towards the social aspects of reference management. Kevin Emamy from the social bookmarking service Citeulike highlighted how personal recommendations from friends and colleagues can be invaluable in finding the 'pearls' in the huge amounts of information available on the web. Similar to Delicious, but with a focus on academia, Citeulike provides tools to easily 'bookmark' academic resources on the web, but in addition allows you to follow other users so you can see the resources they are finding and using. Impressively Citeulike make their data freely available for non-commercial purposes. This approach has already paid dividends in the form of a recently launched recommendation service based on research done by a PhD student utilising the Citeulike data.
Kevin also highlighted how some sites, such as the Public Library of Science (PloS) have started showing how often an article has been bookmarked on Citeulike as a new kind of 'metric' for the impact an article has. This led nicely into the final presentation of the day by Victor Henning from the Bauhaus-University of Weimar and co-founder of Mendeley. Victor introduced Mendeley, currently in beta test, which delivers both a desktop client where you can organise, read and annotate research papers and a website where you can network and share information with others. Victor went on to describe how this rich network of information led to interesting possibilities for 'real-time impact metrics'. As with Citeulike, Mendeley are very interested in getting others working with the detailed data they are collecting, and with this in mind are planning to make some of their data available to the wider community in the future.
The event concluded with a panel session with all the speakers from the day commenting on the key issues raised on the day. The sheer number of tools available to those wishing to organise their references was highlighted. Many of these tools are providing ways of accessing the data that they collect and store which is leading to a breakdown of information silos and encouraging academics to exploit the benefits of sharing information about their use of resources. However it was highlighted by comments from the panel and the floor that alongside these tools we need to ensure that students and academic staff have the ability and understanding of how to evaluate, organise, and exploit information that they have access to.
In a blog post following the event Richard Davis wrote "this is a fascinating area, where e-learning, libraries, preservation and publishing collide, and I'm sure we haven't heard the last of it." I'm sure that he is right.
The event was blogged and recorded. The video will be made available on the TELSTAR blog shortly.
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