In January* this year, I drove through the snow to Milton Keynes (my first-ever visit), to the OU / Telstar workshop: Innovations in Reference Management 2010 (IRM10).
Owen Stephens (Open University) comprehensively blogged and videoed the whole event, and it was fairly well discussed on Twitter, so I won’t attempt to provide a full report on all the presentations.
In short, though, the day went like this:
- What the Telstar project has done is amazing. Making RefWorks really sing, while simultaneously hiding it from students :-)
- I gave a presentation about hacking RefWorks to create new-book feeds (blog|slides).
- Web preservation – intrigued by the potential of ArchivePress.
- New approaches from NPG, Google Wave, CiteULike and Mendeley.
- A panel discussion, which I sat on, followed by lively audience debate. The gist of my contribution: we’re obviously in the middle of a massive market expansion in the number and quality of reference management services available (see “4”), and this influx seems to be encouraging the established providers to re-examine their own offerings and themselves innovate – I’m convinced that a bit of healthy market competition can only benefit the users of the software and the libraries that support them.
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*Yes, I know, I know. Hardly up-to-the-minute reporting, is it? It was a week of thick snow and road closures, which makes it seem even longer ago.
