The last few years have seen a significant growth in the number of online tools being offered to researchers that pledge to embed themselves in their workflows and significantly enhance their efficiency and effectiveness. This session will look at two types of these tools – those which focus primarily on managing content (like Zotero, Papers, PubGet, Mendeley, RefWorks, EndNote, and ReadCube) and those which focus primarily on individuals and collaboration (like academia.edu and ResearchGate), although many of these demonstrate attributes of both types, even though their provenance and key strength lie with one group or the other.
In this session:
- a university librarian will share with us how she has incorporated some of these tools into her own workflows and into the services which she makes available to her library users. She will assess their strengths and weaknesses and examine the challenges that can arise as a result of the development and growth of these tools.
- an A&I service provider will share his thoughts on how information discovery players can ensure that their services both enhance, and may be enhanced by, the functionality offered to users by these new tools.
Both speakers will also provide insights into how end users are deploying these tools, looking at what they find useful, what they don’t, and what additional tools they would like to see developed.
Come to this session either to learn how you can benefit from using some of these tools, or to share your current experience of using any of them.
