Right, so I had trouble remembering to constantly update my reference manager at CiteULike. This is mainly because knowing what articles we had to read already, I found and downloaded all of them at the beginning of the semester. If I had downloaded them on a weekly basis then I might have used it more, but I'm still skeptical of it. I also saved the articles to my Google Scholar library, maybe if there was some sort of plugin to my browser I would be more likely to use it?
I did tag all of the articles I read in my blog posts here and for the articles that I have in my CiteULike reference manager I followed much of the same process. I tagged the last name of the author(s), knowledge management, and then whatever came to mind for that particular article. So for the articles talking about Web 2.0 and KM, then I would (obviously) tag Web 2.0. This system seems viable, but the problem is it would work better if I had many articles like Professor Burns does in his library. In a large library, tagging everything as KM would allow me to pull up all those and then look at the tags of those KM articles to further clarify which article I am looking for. However, since my library was relatively small then it seemed kind of silly to tag everything as knowledge management when all of my articles are KM related. Of course, if I do get into the habit of using CuL or another reference manager, then as my library grows the more relevant and needed my tagging system will be!
Here is a link to my tags on CiteULike.
My CiteULike definitely came in handy for me but the tagging thing not so much. If like you mentioned I had a very large collection of materials it would be very useful, but I do not. The only materials in my library are articles for this class and they all deal with KM. I will say though that it has really helped me keep track of where I am at in the readings. Where I acquired the article as I needed them it was very easy for me to lose track of which ones I had already read and which ones I had not. I am glad that I was introduced to an online reference manager in this class as they could become very handy in the future.
ReplyDeleteI had similar troubles! I really liked CiteULike but had trouble remembering to use it!
ReplyDeleteI was pretty good about entering the articles I'd read, but I wasn't consistent with the tags I was using, so I didn't have big groups of articles with the same tags. I agree that a larger group of articles would probably find more themes...
ReplyDeleteCiteULike and Mendeley are great for storing and classifying information and I wish I knew about them before I took all my other classes in college. Now when I look at my library I have 12 bookshelves and 1/4 of them are with folders with copied and printed articles, neatly labeled:)
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