MENDELEY - AN ALTERNATIVE TO ENDNOTE, REFWORKS, ETC

Mendeley is a relatively new reference manager and research tool, which has done much to introduce a social network element to reference management.  It was in the educational/tech press earlier in the year when Elsevier (the publishing giant) bought the company for a reported £45-£60 million (see the report in Wired for example).

A colleague has been offering introductions to this, and you can see his slides below.

Introduction to Mendeley from Allan Parsons

Or here is another set of slides from a librarian in Singapore:

Mendeley - Introduction from Hazman Aziz

Film theory - the most borrowed books

Back in April, I did some research to determine which were the most borrowed books in the area of Photography theory.  You can see the results here.

I thought it was about time to redo the exercise - this time focussing on film.  So, here is the list - the ten most borrowed books in film... (in the past three years).

The list starts with the most borrowed item first this time.  You can also take a look at the books on Library Search in A-Z order.

Bordwell, D. Film art; an introduction [various editions]. McGraw-Hill.

Braudy, L. and Cohen, M. (eds.). Film theory and criticism; introductory readings [various editions]. Oxford University Press.

Cook, P. The cinema Book [various editions].  BFI.

Bordwell, D. (1986). Narration in fiction film. Routledge.

Andrejevic, M. (2004).  Reality TV: the work of being of being watched.  Rowman & Littlefield.

Metz, C. (1982). Psychoanalysis and cinema; the imaginary signifier.  Macmillan.

Chion, M. (1994). Audio-vision: sound on screen. Columbia University Press.

Mill, B. (2005). Television sitcom. BFI.

Mcabe, J. and Akass, K. (2007). Quality TV; contemporary American television and beyond. I. B. Tauris.

Rees, A. L. A history of experimental film and video; from the canonical avant-garde to contemporary British practice [two editions].  BFI.

Learn to use Refworks in 20 minutes

RefWorks is a bibliographic management tool.  In other words, you can use it  to gather, store and manage your references, and to automatically generate a list of references/bibliography.

Many online catalogues and databases allow you to push records straight into Refworks.  You can do this in Library Search from within the e-shelf.  You can then create a list of references in a range of different referencing formats with a few clicks...

The lists generated are not perfect - they will contain errors that you need to correct - but they provide a good starting point.

If you are interested in finding out more, check out the 'Learn to use Refworks in 20 minutes' video playlist on the Refworks YouTube Channel.

If Refworks seems like too much trouble, have a look at EasyBib.  As well as the website, EasyBib have produced apps for IPhone, Android and Google mobiles, which will generate a reference when you scan in the barcode of a book.


Resources

EasyBib

Learn to use Refworks in 20 minutes [video playlist]

Refworks and Endnote [University of Westminster page]

Refworks - Help

Refworks YouTube Channel

Skills training in relation to conceptions of knowledge and learning

"Metacognitive awareness and control,"  versus "quantitative accretion of discrete rightness."

Graham Gibbs writes interestingly about the usefulness or otherwise of study skills training in an short article in the last week's issue of THES: see here.

Students, "rarely use the methods they read about in how-to-study books or are taught on study skills courses" he asserts.  This is for a number of reasons he suggests (without expanding on this), but most importantly because:

"the skills may be too rigid to span the range of demands that students actually face."  

In any case, he argues, there is little evidence that the acquisition of study skills improves performance - with one exception: time management.

He suggests two things mark out effective students, in contrast to those who are "bewildered" or "unsophisticated".  These, he says,  are:

 "not about “skills” at all but about understanding.” 

Firstly, effective students are reflective and adapt their behaviours to different demands:

"Effective students can tell you all about how they go about their task, have a sensible rationale for doing so and change what they do when they notice that the context or task demands are different." 

In the educational literature, he tells us, this is known as "metacognitive awareness and control."

Secondly, effective students:

"understand the nature of knowledge and what they are supposed to do with it." 

This is in contrast to less effective students who try to spot the right answers in lectures, and memorise them - a method, described in the literature as, "quantitative accretion of discrete rightness."

Food for thought.

Further reading

Teaching intelligence - It is possible to avoid the negative mass effects

Teaching intelligence: Contact hours and student engagement

Raising awareness of best-practice pedagogy

How to decide what to read?

A lot of what librarians teach about information skills are the techniques of searching, rather than the sort of thinking that needs to happen.

I've been thinking a lot about this because so often the techniques of searching, while useful, are not enough to answer many of the questions that students pose: what is needed is thinking.

I was reminded of this recently when reading a book in the Palgrave Study Skills series, How to use your reading in your essays, for preparation for a teaching session.  This is a short book which tells you all about how to write with sources.

Early on in the book, there is a section entitled, 'How to decide what to read?' which gives the following five steps:

Step 1. Think: what question do you want to answer?
Step 2. Think: what ideas of your own do you already have?
Step 3. Think: what types of source will you need?
Step 4. Do a first search
Step 5. Think: sort and select your sources for detailed reading

That is a lot of thinking!

Could it be that searching is the part of the iceberg above the water line that should be supported by the thinking going on beneath?

In our search-engine oriented world, searching is often done without thinking.   It is not something that is just affliciting the young, but is pervasive.  As soon as a question is forming in our minds it is already being expressed in our fingers, and before it is fully expressed in our fingers, Google is giving us answers - of a sort. This is fine if our question is, 'Where can I get a pizza in Harrow?', but for more complex questions, this approach can often lead us into trouble.  It is easy to get lost in a sea of information, with little idea of what it was we were trying to find out in the first place.

A few quotations illustrate the point:

Any idiot can type a search term into an internet search engine, and many idiots do.  The typical internet query is about 2.4 words long and has about a 14 per cent chance of failing because it contains a mis-spelling.

Rugg and Petre (2007: 48)

It is easy to produce dreadful assignments by using a search engine to do a quick, undiscriminating trawl. Searching for a few words from your assignment task, copying from websites you come across and then pasting together disconnected bits and pieces to present as your assignment will get you a very low grade.

Northedge and Chambers (2008: 271) 

There was a time when the word “research” meant “critical and exhaustive research or experimentation having as its aim the discovery of new facts or interpretations" (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 1976). Research today often means little more than locating random snippets using a search engine.

Gorman (2012: 114)

Research is at least 80% about forming questions, reflecting on what you know already, understanding the sources that might extend your knowledge, and thinking about and selecting the material you find.  Less than 20% is about doing the search.  That is the easy bit!  Or at least it is easy when you have a good idea of what you are looking for.

Further reading

Godfrey, J. (2009).  How to use your reading in your essays.  Palgrave Macmillan.

Gorman, M. (2012). The prince’s dream: a future for academic libraries, The New Review of Academic Librarianship, 18(2), 114

Northedge, A. and Chambers, E. (2008). The arts good study guide, 2nd ed. The Open University Press.

Rugg, G. and Petre, M. (2007).  A gentle guide to research methods.  Open University Press.