Tag: tagging

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Banishing the Bibliography Blues

Does the prospect of organizing reference citations leave you suffering from headaches? Does compiling bibliographies for your papers give you the blues? Never fear, for there is a cure for what ails you: reference management software.

What is reference management software?

If you don’t use a reference management tool already, you will want to start as soon as you finish reading this post! These tools will make your life as a student much easier and cure those citation headaches and banish those bibliography blues. Basically reference management tools are software applications that are designed to help you write your papers with ease and style. They will help you to organize your references, format them in any style you desire (e.g. MLA, APA, Chicago) and automatically generate in-text citations and bibliographies. A guaranteed time-saver!

Lots of (smart!) people use RefWorks or Endnote reference management software to organize their citations. As a UBC student, you can create your own profile and use RefWorks for free.  Check it out! Unfortunately RefWorks can be a bit cumbersome to use and Endnote is expensive to buy, but never fear there are many other useful options like Zotero. You may ask “why bother using Zotero?” Well, there are lots of great reasons:

  • Zotero is free! You don’t have to pay a cent for it.
  • It resides right on your Firefox browser and captures information from the Web.
  • The interface is designed with you – the Web surfer – in mind. You can surf the Web and save items at the same time.
  • Zotero allows you to tag, write notes and attach files to your items, drag and drop, mark up pdfs and web pages AND MORE….

The more you know about it, the more you’ll love using it.

What exactly is Zotero?

Zotero is an open source Firefox Add-on which can be easily installed on both your private computers and those in university labs. It enables users to collect, manage and cite research from all types of sources. The citations captured by Zotero can be books from Amazon, Google Books, and online library catalogs (e.g.WorldCat). It also captures papers from Google Scholar and online subscription databases (e.g. Web of Science or ABI/Inform). It can generate in-text citations and bibliographies automatically in wikis, blogs, Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer.

To see what Zotero can do, check out these screencasts.

Don’t use Firefox as your browser?

No worries, there are other free reference management tools out there that work great with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer! Mendeley is a free application that has many of the same features as Zotero and features a downloadable desktop application so you can store and manage your references both online and off. You can also import your library from CiteULike directly into your online Mendeley library with ease.

There are also many other up and coming reference tools that are also worth checking out like Citavi and Qiqqa. You can see a comparison of available reference tools here.

So stop wasting time fretting over your bibliographies and let these great applications get busy and take care of them for you!

This post was originally created for the Digital Media Project, a joint project of UBC School of Library, Archival and Information Studies and the Irving K Barber Learning Centre. It has been modified from its original form.

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Sharing Online

Demystifying Delicious

What’s Delicious?

Delicious makes it easy for you to have a single set of portable bookmarks which can be accessed elsewhere through the internet. More than that, it’s a social bookmarking service so you can tag, save, organize, search and share bookmarks through the web. Like what so-and-so is posting on the art of bread? You can view more of so-and-so’s links and learn as much as you want on bread as your heart desires.

The main strengths of this bookmarking? It greatly improves how people discover, remember and share information on topics that they are most interested in.

For a basic understanding of its capacities, have a look at this clip.

Delicious

My links are nicely organized in my folders. I know what they’re about. Why tag them?

I asked this question myself, not warming up to the concept at first. Then I thought of the tagging feature more. Think of it. You have a load of links to helpful / favourite websites in your folder called, oh I don’t know … let’s say “Pastries”. You like pastries … making them, eating them, and talking about them to get more ideas for making them and good places to buy them. You soon have 20 links in the folder. As you put them in you know what they’re all about and are confident you can jog your memory quickly as to what you’d find if you went with the first link, or perhaps even the 12th, or the 20th. A few weeks go by in which you’re immersed in a mind-bending physics report and have got a new job leaving you with little sleep let alone enough time to study … it’s Sunday today and you can’t remember which link had the info on the place with the good deals on éclairs only over the weekend .

With delicious tagging, you give that link the tag “éclair discounts” and “weekends” and voila. Bon appétit.

Point being, with tagging a bookmark you can save time and drama over pastries in your life by seeing the website and corresponding tags describing its contents right away. No rummaging through all 20 links to find some particular obscure information you really need for a paper. Or for a hunger craving.

Getting A Delicious Account and Using its Basics

1.       Getting an Account

Go to delicious.com to apply a delicious account by clicking the upper right Join Now!

Step 1: Enter Details

Step 2: Add Buttons

Step 3: Import Existing Bookmarks

Step 1 is mandatory for the registration, Step 2 and 3 can be skipped and completed later. However, in order to save and tag bookmarks delicious bookmark buttons are necessary.

If you want to add links to Delicious directly on a browser (rather than copying and pasting the a site’s URL into your Delicious account), don’t forget to select the “Add on ” feature.

a. To install Firefox Add-on, go to http://delicious.com/help/quicktour/firefox

b. To install Internet Explorer Add-on, go to http://delicious.com/help/quicktour/ie

c. To install Bookmarklet to browsers, go to http://delicious.com/help/bookmarklets, Bookmarklet Buttons can be installed to Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Chrome      and Opera bookmark toolbar by drag and drop links.

2. Tagging and saving

a. Select to tag, add Notes, send the bookmark to your network user/users and share the bookmark in public or keep it private. Then click the Save button to save the bookmark to your account.

b. Users with Bookmarklet Buttons, click Bookmark on Delicious and do the same as above.

3. Adding users to your network

a. Click People menu, and then click in the upper right corner to add a user to your network.

b. Users can also click Settings in the upper right corner and then click Edit Network to add or remove users from their networks.

4. Subscribing to tags that interest you

a. Under Tags which you’d seen in the submenu 

click from the upper right corner to add your favorite tags.

b. Users can also click Settings in the upper right corner and then click Edit Subscriptions to add/edit subscriptions.

5. Mashup with other tools

  • Linkrolls to display a list of your recent Delicious bookmarks as part of your website.
  • Tagrolls to display a cloud or list of your Delicious tags as part of your website.
  • Network Badges to show your readers that you are a member of Delicious and give them an easy way to add you to their network.
  • Blog Posting to Experimental feature that can automatically post entries to your blog every day containing your latest links.
  • Facebook Application to enhance your Facebook account with content and notifications from your bookmarks

These are the basics … once you get going you’ll discover quite a few nifty features. That said, you may also want to check out Pinboard, another similar tool. It’s less busy and text heavy but at the moment, the thought of paying for it isn’t convincing me to make the leap. 

 

 

firehose sipping – managing your rss feeds

Like we said a few weeks ago, RSS is a great tool for keeping up with frequently updated information sources. If you followed our NetworkEducation you even set up a Google Reader account. The problem with RSS is the absolute flood of information you can open yourself up to.

If you follow 50 blogs that post weekly, that’s 50 posts each week, so fewer than 10 a day. That’s not too hard to keep on top of. You can easily manage to read all of those posts, even if you don’t check your reader every day. But if you’ve got a site like CBC.ca in there updating you with dozens of the day’s headlines that can add up to piles and piles of posts, taunting you with their unread status.

There are a couple of good habits to develop as you become a heavier RSS user that’ll save your sanity.

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Sharing Online

Facebook – Being a Smart User

Let’s face it, the world has gone the way of Facebook. Most of us are on it, or at least know tons of people who use it. The point of this post is not to trash talk the service, the point of this post is just to clarify some things for people with Facebook accounts. Whether you’re a casual user, a fanatic user, or anywhere in between the two, there are a few key privacy and security aspects you should be aware of.

One really important thing that not all users know is that your information, including your photos, might be made available for use that you would not want – depending on your account settings. If you are using Facebook, you should be aware of the security and privacy options available to you and set them to whatever level you are comfortable with, keeping in mind the internet forgets nothing.

Some Security and Privacy Options:

The first thing you should know is to use a secure unique password for your Facebook login.

Second, make sure your account is set to ‘Secure Browsing (https).’ The point of the setting is to prevent people from intercepting your account while you’re signed in on an insecure wi-fi connection and start browsing your account. [You can read more about this at LifeHacker’s article “Firesheep Sniffs Out Facebook and Other User Credentials on Wi-Fi Hotspots”].

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Sharing Online

The Power of a Tweet – Microblogging

When people first hear about microblogging, there are two common reactions: “Why would anyone want to know what I’m doing right now?” and “It’s fun on Facebook, but how could it possibly be part of my personal success story?”

Like many other new web tools, however, the more you microblog, the more uses you can find for it. It’s the little tool that could and part of the next wave of online products that could really change the way we do things.

What exactly is microblogging?

Here’s how microblogging works:

  • Write a text messages (less than 140 characters)
  • Post it online through a microblogging tool like Twitter or identi.ca.
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Working

Evernote… A Crafty Note-Taking Tool

Taking notes is a daily event in the student life. Whether you’re taking notes in class, taking notes for course readings and assignments, or keeping track of things you need to get done throughout the semester – a note-taking tool is a necessity. For some students, the tried and true traditional method of pen and paper is good enough for getting the job done. However, if you want to go digital, Evernote is a really useful tool.

Evernote is a note-taking app that works on Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, etc. and allows you to sync between devices and the cloud. With the app you can create digital notebooks, setup checklists, capture images, upload images from your smartphone and digital camera, bookmark webpages, tag notes, tag bookmarks, and copy and paste online text/images into your notes.  It also recognizes text within images (using OCR) so that you can search the images and text at the same time. So if you still rather take notes with pen and paper, you can just take a low resolution photo of the notes (keeping the file small), upload it into one of your notebooks, and still be able to use the handy searching feature. Evernote also allows for sharing of notes and notebooks, and so it can be used as a collaboration tool. Keep reading though because there is some fine print that you should be aware in deciding if you want to use the app…

Evernote is ad supported, which means you can use it for free because a little ad at the bottom left corner of the window is how it gets its revenue. In the ad supported free account you get 60MB of upload space per month. If you want more space, you can pay $5/month or $45/year for the Premium option of 1GB of space. If you’re just taking text notes and not uploading many images, the 60MB/month is plenty of space for a semester’s worth of notes. However, if uploading images is really important for your note-taking purposes, then depending on the file size of your images, the 60MB is going to go fast, so you would probably need to pay for Premium space. The other important thing to mention is that the ad supported option only lets people who you share notebooks with view them. The premium option lets those you share notebooks with to view and edit them. Therefore, as a collaboration tool, Premium Evernote is a better option.

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Sharing Online

Linkblogging = Pointing at Awesome

So you’ve found something awesome on the internet. Maybe it’s a comic or a LOLcat or an article that completely supports your side of a recent argument about the economic foundations of Prussia. Great. How are you going to tell people about it?

You’ve got a lot of options in the current digital environment. You could email your friends, you can put it on your Facebook (under sharing Links, it’s on the lefthand side of the page), or you can make a linkblog and share it with the world.

Linkblogs are a bit different than regular blogs. While a blog can be a platform for you to write and express yourself, a linkblog is more like a pointer to cool stuff you didn’t make. The benefits of this kind of thing should be easy to see: it isn’t as hard to point people at something cool as it is to create something cool yourself. Remember our post about RSS readers, and how we called them news aggregators? Well, a linkblog is kind of like an attention aggregator. You’re pointing out things you think someone else should pay attention to. The more people who do it, the more will be infected with whichever your favourite meme is.

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Tag! You’re it!

You have probably already used tagging – or have been tagged – and may not even know it. Have you ever received an email from Facebook telling you that “You’ve been tagged in a photo”? Or maybe you’re a movie geek and enjoy adding descriptive words to movies on The Internet Movie Database. These are examples of tagging in action!

What exactly is tagging?

Tagging is a common term that refers to adding labels to items (photos, books, movies, webpages, etc.) that are found online. When you’re looking for something online, often you can find it quicker and more easily if there’s a label. With the growing vastness of information available on the Internet, it’s impossible for “professionals” to label everything and computers just don’t have the human touch required to do the job right. But now that the web has gone interactive, we don’t have to rely on pros and ‘bots – anyone can tag! Everyone can collaborate through online tagging to point other web surfers in the right direction to find stuff online.

Continue reading “Tag! You’re it!”

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