New articles: Health information; Information Behaviour; Music Selection; Fake news; Listening practices

The latest issue has been published (Vol. 29 No. 2, 2024) of open access journal Information Research. This is the final issue with Professor Emeritus Tom Wilson as Editor in Chief. He founded the journal in 1995, and it a tribute to his hard work and inspiration that it remains a high quality publication with no charges for either author or reader. 

He notes in his editorial
"I thought when I started the journal that the new technologies would bring about major changes in the scholarly publishing arena: it was now possible for a single academic, like myself, to create a new journal independently of the commercial publishers who dominated the field, much to the economic costs of academic institutions. Sadly, that potential future has not been realised and the commercial publishers are as much in control as ever, and there are even fewer, as a result of mergers and acquisitions.
"There are obvious reasons for this: on one hand academics have increased teaching loads and pressure to research and publish, and the institutions are (at least in the UK) "marketised" and in competition, with a reduction in the possibilities of cooperation. On the other hand, governments are more interested in preserving their publishing industries than in genuine freedom of information. They would rather see publishing companies making massive profits from their so-called "open access" policies than support the development of genuinely open access in universities. How "open" can publishing be if authors and/or their institutions are required to pay?" 

There are two parts to this issue: regular contents and also the proceedings of the 15th ISIC conference. I will cover the latter in a future post. The regular peer-reviewed papers include:
- Reasons to fight: preliminary results on motivations to combat fake news by Wenting Yu
- ‘Alexa, play metal’: exploring music selection and personal information management via voice assistants by Jochen Steffens, Jesse David Dinneen, Sascha Donner, Tom Potthoff
- Cognitive authorities of COVID-19 information: educational differences and outcomes of trust in health experts and social media influencers in Finland Sanna Malinen, Aki Koivula
- Developing expertise and managing inaccessibility: a study of reading by listening practices among students with blindness or vision impairment by Anna Lundh
- Health information-seeking on Reddit, by people who use opioids by Margaret Sullivan, Jonah Hancock, George Shaw, Chaoqun Ni
- Approaching information-seeking habits and their contextual features by Reijo Savolainen
Go to https://informationr.net/infres/issue/view/37
Photo by Sheila Webber: Bandstand (June 2024) in Sheffield, original home of Information Research (that is: the university, not the bandstand)

Design Thinking; Citation styles #ECIL2023

As my final session at ECIL I attended and liveblog Information Literacy in the Design Thinking process – A Preliminary Research was presented by Dorota Rak (Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland). She identified that design thinking can be seen as a mindset, a methodology or a problem solving philosophy. Rak say that it was “a manifestation of collective intelligence” where students are designers and also use innovative designs. There are three aspects – the institutional area, the operational area (e.g. with tools supporting the design thinking process) and the didactic area. Rak said that librarians had recognised the value of integrating DT, that DT can be a driver of information behaviour, and also that DT can be used to develop practice and learning. Rak identified that IL was “a vauable competency for nuturing social capital”. 
The research problems that Rak addressed were – what information competencies do students need for DT; what tools do they need; what skills do they need. Data was collected through a questionnaire administered to university students and also examination of the literature. The majority of the respondents had a good understanding of both “Information Literacy” and “Design Thinking”. The majority also were able to define their information needs across the DT process. However, some stages were seen as more difficult and in more need of support.
The students were asked how useful they found obtained information across the stages of the Design Thinking process. There were differencies across the stages and also between students on the 2 different programmes surveyed. There were also differences in terms of organising information, and use of different tools. Conclusions included designing a curriculum that effectively integrated information management principles with the dynamic iterative nature of DT. 

The second presentation was “Who Cares?” Defining Citation Style in Scholarly Journals from Pavla Vizváry (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) and Vincas Grigas (Vilnius University, Lithuania). Grigas started by identifying that there are more citation styles (10 thousand) than species of birds! The identified problem is that there are all these styles, you have to follow a style strictly in published journals, people are not expert in all styles, so so authors make mistakes. This is a problem as it’s a burden to authors, but inconsistency makes it more difficult to find articles etc. Their aim was to identify citation styles required by journals in SCOPUS. They had questions such as how cleraly the journals express their requirement. They analysed 270 journals, looking also for types of mistake in citation. They were aiming to understand how different stakeholders (e.g. authors, publishers) are affected. Also they used cognitive load theory – worries about formatting can divert energy from the main task of writing.
Vizváry took over to return to the question of “Who cares”? The answer included publishers, editors, librarians, authors and teachers. Introducing SCOPUS, they looked at Lithuanian and Czech journals and also sampled journals published in other countries, comparing their statistics (such as H index). From this statistical point of view the Czech and Lithuanian journals were similar to each other, but had a slightly different profile to the international sample. Vizváry also noted that there were more English-only journals published in Lithuania and Czech Republic than national language ones, and there were differences in the patterns of open publishing. Moving on to differences in form of intext references (numbers or author names) there were significant differences by subject, and this was more important than differences from country to country.
The most common journal reference style is, sadly, “unnamed” i.e. they just give examples, next was APA. They noted that the ISO format was strong in the Czech Republic, but not elsewhere. In social sciences APA was named a lot, but “unnamed” was the most common in some subjects. 84.4% of journals give example references (others tend to link to the style’s website). They also noted that not all journals include DOIs in their reference styles. There was a question afterwards about whether the “unnamed” styles were actually specific styles, and the authors said that they’d tried some unnamed styles in ChatGPT and it had said in each case that it was like style X, but with these differences. They were thinking of doing more of this ChatGPT-aided diagnosis.

Photo by Sheila Webber: sleepy pigeons in Krakow

New articles: Health information; Information literacy self-efficacy; Agricultural information; Managing personal records

There is a new issue of the open access journal Information Research (volume 27 issue 2). It includes
- Muhammad Asif Naveed. Information literacy self-efficacy of scientists working at the Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research
- Reijo Savolainen. What drives people to prefer health-related misinformation? The viewpoint of motivated reasoning
- Matt Balogh, William Billingsley, David Paul, and Mary Anne Kennan. Understanding the management of personal records at home: a virtual guided tour 
- Marco Capocasa, Paolo Anagnostou, and Giovanni Destro Bisol. A light in the dark: open access to medical literature and the COVID-19 pandemic
- Murat Konca, Şenol Demirci, Cuma Çakmak, and Özgür Uğurluoğlu. Exploring the socio-economic determinants of health information-seeking behaviour on the Internet in Turkey
- Tami Oliphant, Tanya Berry, and Colleen M. Norris. ‘In a perfect world doctors and the medical profession would accept people for who they are’: women’s heart health information practices
- Tumpe Ndimbwa, Kelefa Mwantimwa, and Faraja Ndumbaro. Smallholder farmers’ satisfaction with agricultural information accessed in rural Tanzania
Go to http://informationr.net/ir/27-2/infres272.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: Ritz, 2022

Ignorance management

Two recently released videos from Australia: I must confess that I haven't watched these all the way through, but the bits I sampled looked interesting. "We talk about Knowledge Management but less so about Ignorance Management - and yet there is likely more ignorance in the world. And if knowledge is poorly understood then ignorance is even murkier. For this session, we will cover: The range of ignorances that we all find in organizational life and their impact on us; The benefits as well as the downsides of ignorance; The patterns of human behaviour that lead to ignorance; How we can harness as well as counter ignorance to lead to better outcomes."
Jason Collins: https://youtu.be/Dc_vN0r3rBc
Matt Moore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCw47L4tWok
Photo by Sheila Webber: Flat white, Paddington, Sydney, July 2019

Reports from the #CILIPconf2018 #cilipconf18

My department, the Information School at the University of Sheffield, UK, had an exhibition stand at the CILIP 2018 conference, and we sponsored 6 of our students: they mostly attended the conference, but they also helped out on our exhibition stand (see photo, which I took on the first day). We asked them to write conference reports to put on our blog, and here they are:
- He Liu (MSc Data Science student) http://information-studies.blogspot.com/2018/07/cilip-conference-2018-highlights-by_74.html
- Kathryn Aylward (MA Librarianship student) http://information-studies.blogspot.com/2018/07/cilip-conference-2018-highlights-by_32.html
- Xindi Jiang (MSc Information Management student) http://information-studies.blogspot.com/2018/07/cilip-conference-2018-spotlight-by.html
- Katherine Burchell (MA Library and Information Service Management (Distance Learning) student) http://information-studies.blogspot.com/2018/07/cilip-conference-2018-highlights-by_17.html
- Beth Jackson (PGDip Library and Information Services Management (Distance Learning) student) http://information-studies.blogspot.com/2018/07/cilip-conference-2018-highlights-by.html
- Catherine Hoodless (PhD student) http://information-studies.blogspot.com/2018/07/cilip-conference-2018-highlights-by-phd.html

The conference Twitter stream was at https://twitter.com/hashtag/CILIPConf2018?src=hash

IM and IL pioneer Woody Horton dies

I only just heard the sad new that Forest “Woody” Horton died of natural causes in his home in Washington, D.C., on December 7, 2017, at the age of 87. He had retained an active interest in the information world to the end. He did particularly valuable work in connecting Information Management and Information Literacy, stressing organisational, strategic and policy aspects of information literacy.
A notable publication was the UNESCO publication, Understanding information literacy "In essence, explaining in an easy-to-understand, non-technical fashion to senior and middle level public and private sector executives – in government ministries, private enterprises, academic institutions, and not-for-profit organizations – how to find, retrieve, organize, evaluate and effectively use information":
- Horton, F. (2008). Understanding information literacy: a primer. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/publications-and-communication-materials/publications/full-list/understanding-information-literacy-a-primer/
And some more papers are:
- Horton, F.W. (2011). Information Literacy Advocacy—Woody's Ten Commandments. Library Trends, 60(2), 262-276. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/461990
- Horton, F.W. (2006). Information literacy and information management: A 21st century paradigm partnership. International Journal of Information Management, 26(4), 263-266. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02684012/26/4
- Horton, F.W and Keiser, B.E. (2008). Encouraging Global Information Literacy. Computers in Libraries, 28 (10), p6-11, 27-32. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ817319
There are other works that are important to information resources management, and other infolit contributions include the UNESCO Training the Trainer programme, and the report on infolit resources around the world. There is an obituary here.

Information Literacy and Information Culture in Higher Education #ecil2015

Continuing liveblogging from the European Conference on Information Literacy 2015 in Tallinn, Estonia. The next talk I am attending is: Information Literacy and Information Culture in Higher Education Information Literacy and Information Culture in Higher Education Institutions in Estonia. It is presented by Liia Lauri, and coauthored with her supervisors Sirje Virkus and Mati Heidmets.
Information Culture is here interpreted in its information management sense, as an information culture (IC) within an organisation (information/knowledge practices, attitudes and values). Thus the research questions concerned the various ICs in HE instititions in Esonia and how they could be characterised, as well as looking at whether there was any relationship with job satisfaction.
Data was collected via a web based questionnaire, using concepts developed through previous research e.g. information sharing as a component of IC. There were 160 respondents from 12 institutions.
Through factor analysis they identified 3 types of IC:
- Integrated, with academics well informed about their unit and the institution, with formally regulated information sharing: a transparent process
- Proactive, in which the focus is on serach for trends and changes in HE, involved in joint activities, with a high use of new information channels
- Informal, in which people prefer to get information from colleagues, rather than from formal sources.
In terms of information use, Integrated uses more internal (intranet) sources, whereas Proactive uses more external sources (e.g. websites) and uses sources more frequently. Integrated was satisfied with information availability, whilsy Informal was frustrated about information overload.
There was a significant correlation between Integrated and job satisfaction and satisfaction with leadership, as well as with self-reported performance. However Informal IC had negative correlation with job satisfaction and there was more willingness to leave their jobs.
Thus a key finding was that having an integrated IC had significant correlations with job satisfaction and self-reported performance: on the other hand it is notable that this IC was not so outward looking and alert for trends. Therefore it is not compatible with a risk-taking culture that might be seen as necessary for organisational development and market awareness.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Tallinn, 2011 (I will be reusing some of my old photos today!)

Building a dependable digital future #i3rgu

I’m liveblogging day 2 of the i3 conference held this week at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. Today's keynote was William Kilbride with a talk entitled Sic transit gloria digitis: building a dependable digital future?. As usual, this is liveblogging, so it is just my impression, and as this is not a core area of mine, apologies for mistakes!
Kilbride is Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition. The "aim of the Digital Preservation Coalition is to secure the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base."
He started by exploring the phrase "data is the new oil": was data abundant? was it inexhautible? could useful information be easily extracted? He identified the problem of web links disappearing: in particular giving the example of information used to respond to parliamentary questions i.e. information that it is important to be able to refer to for a period of time. Thus he characterised data as fragile.
Kilbride went on to talk about myths of digital preservation. He referred to an article by Chris Rusbridge which discussed these myths, and he focused on a few of them. For example "file formats are always changing". However, it is more nuanced than this: there are more robust formats, proliferating formats (e.g. types of .tif) etc. Kilbride then cited a paper by Malcolm Todd. Todd proposed on managing data flows and having a preservation strategy focused on your own capacity and needs. This was more important that worrying about controlling file formats.
Kilbride looked at the issue of whether digital preservation was expensive. It is often perceived as expensive, but restoring and preserving physical documents, objects and structures tends to be more expensive. He contrasted the cost of the Archaeology Data Service website with the cost of preserving the items in the museums collection of a major city. At this point Kilbride mentioned the 4Cproject http://4cproject.eu/ (Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation).
He discussed issues around metadata e.g. should the data be characterised before it goes into the repository, or can you leave it til it's in the repository? With changes in the types of data etc. the data may need to be recharacterised: Kilbride posed the question - at what point does metadata become a problem rather than a solution?
An interesting conclusion was that he could "no longer distinguish" between data, systems and services (he gave the example of cloud computing being a service rather than a product). They were becoming interdependent, and this meant some rethinking of what data was and how you preserve it: what is it you were wanting to preserve? It was also important to remember why you were preserving data and to think about the people factors (perhaps coming back to the socio-cultural perspective mentioned by Olof Sundin in the first keynote).

Further links mentioned by Kilbride that you might find interesting: TIMBUS project http://timbusproject.net/; OAIS Reference Model http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=57284
Photo by Sheila Webber: the speaker glimpsed over the top of my blogger's netbook

Information encountering and management in information literacy instruction of undergraduate students.

I have included information encountering in my infrmation literacy classes for many years, as it is an information behaviour that I think it is important for people to reflect on. If (like me) you are a "super encounterer" it is important to adapt your information management practices. Therefore I was interetsted in this new (priced) article:
Stewart, K. and Basic, J. (2014) Information encountering and management in information literacy instruction of undergraduate students. International Journal of Information Management, 34 (2), 74–79. Abstract: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401213001321
Photo by Sheila Webber: Christmas tree ornament, 2013

Making sense of the complexity of knowledge work in organizations #i3rgu

The keynote for the 3rd day at the i3 http://www.i3conference.org.uk/ #i3rgu conference in Aberdeen, Scotland is from Jane McKenzie (Henley Business School), talking about Connections and Contradictions – Making sense of the complexity of knowledge work in organizations. She distinguished between information and knowledge, seeing knowledge as being socially constructed, and integrated into the meaning/ understanding you have of the world: this can lead to dissonance when people have different understandings.
This perspective sees the stage of absorbtion/ sense making by the person as being the most important aspect of information. McKenzie presented Choo's model of information seeking behaviour, which has perception of an information gap (anomolous state of knowledge) at its start. She also talked about notable examples of industries or governments not keeping in touch with the market and new developments and suffering "temporary incompetence", not seeking and managing information and knowledge effectively in times of disruption and change. Disruptions can also come from within the organisation as well e.g. because of new business-critical systems, mergers, reorganisation.

McKenzie identified that we have to reflect on our ontology and epistemology (what do we see as knowledge, and what is our view of the world)? She and her colleagues use a complexity lens to look at these problems. Looking at conflicts and differences is seen as valuable: capabilities, purpose, values, behaviours and the wider environment. You can look at these elements at the individual, team and organisational level, to look for differences and also paradoxes "contradictory yet interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time".
One issue is developing leaders (not just at the top of the organisation, since organisations are continuing to flatten) who are able to identify and negotiate this complexity. They needed to be able to identify "what matters" and interact with/inspire staff. In this context "leadership is a knowledge and learning enabling role". McKenzie referred to Choo again here; his perspective on organisational learning. If you are interested in this you can follow the link (above) to Choo's website as he puts a lot of information it (Choo is still a core author for our information mangement students at Sheffield!).
Back to the talk - McKenzie highlighted the "knowing - doing" gap on Choo's model - how do you get your ideas into action. She alluded here to the problem of organisational, as opposed to individual, learning. McKenzie highlighted behaviours etc. that different studies have shown to help in the process of being a leader in a time of paradox and contradiction (which I wasn't quick enough to write down). Engaging actively with the paradoxical, acknowledging ambiguity, paying attention to potential personal bias, looking outside the immediate context of the decision: these were all factors that were seen as needing attention if leaders were to be able to make sense of situations. She mentioned creating space to ponder the problem and its complexity (which I think connected with the research about creativity I blogged about on day 1).
The (apologies!) rather fuzzy slide I present at the top of the post summarised key aspects of her perspective. I will not try to explain it, but certainly a key element that was emphasised was supporting learning and change in individuals and the community. The iteration of the diagram that she presented after the one above included "Co-creating a learning culture", "Transcultural competence" and "embedding a performance challenge culture" (with workers aware of how they are developing).
I have found a document that appears to summarise some of this at http://www.henley.ac.uk/web/FILES/corporate/CL-Knowledge_in_Action__issue_26.pdf
(The rabbits are nothing to do with the talk: I photographed them just now in the university grounds)

Information behaviour of people working in local government organisations #i3rgu

I’m at the i3 http://www.i3conference.org.uk/ #i3rgu conference in Aberdeen, Scotland (day 1). Mark Hepworth presented a paper on A study of the information behaviour of people working in local government organisations: building corporate information capabilities. This study took place over about 3 years.
There are various drivers and challenges to local government in England, with implications for how they use and share information (e.g. "joining up" services). This is at the same time as they are having to make financial cuts and as the fall-out from any information disasters can be punitive. Despite the importance of information management, workers are experiencing information overload and stress, in different information cultures and with different systems. There has been an emphasis on technical solutions (which are sometimes expensive non-solutions), and information management (IM) tends not to be at the forefront of people's minds: the practice is in focus, not the information associated with it.
The purpose of the research was to work towards a change in organisational culture with more awareness of IM; to contribute to a corporate IM strategy; to understand workers' information experiences and to develop a set of tools to help.
There were 4 teams (30 participants) in different areas of local government, investigated using various data collection techniques e.g. observation, e-survey, interview, workshops. Through this data collection the researchers gained insight into people's current IM views, values, capabilities and practice. They spent time with the teams which gained the participants trust and interest in the researchers and the actual research topic. For the workshops, the researchers developed some IM stereotypes (e.g. hoarder, sharer) which enabled people to discuss, and reflect on, these behaviours in their teams.
The researchers found that there were issues with things like: storage, retention, disposal, sharing, quality, security, search and retrieval. Mark highlighted some of the particular problems around these areas e.g. people using data sticks for storing information, uncertainty about which information to keep or throw away. Different parts of local government will be focusing on e.g. troubled families, so they can intervene before things get out of hand (e.g. if a vulnerable teenagers is planning to leave home). This brings in a requirement to share information across departments, to understand what other information people might have etc. There was misunderstanding about the data protection act (e.g. resulting in less sharing of information than is allowed, with adverse impact on ability to act for the benefit of vulnerable families and individuals)
Researchers found that there was a lot of variation between individual workers (factors included recent vs. long term employees) and inconsistency of practice. This was the first time that people had the opportunity to discuss their IM practice, even though they were dealing with citizens' highly sensitive personal information. The positive side was that they were now taking IM seriously, realising that IM capabilities needed to be addressed, with implications for training.
However this is a very complex problem area, with many factors affecting workers' information behaviour. Examples are the hierarchical nature of work in local government, the different information cultures. There is also both an individual level and a team/shared level of IM and information behaviour: training etc. needs to address both individual and team capabilities. The researchers have gone on to develop e-learning packages about information security and information sharing. They are putting a lot of emphasis on why it is important (for example, why it is important to share information and what the consequences are of not sharing). Mark also mentioned that the there is an information sharing hub (MASH: Multi Agency Information Sharing Hub) in Leicestershire and also a national initiative IISaM (Improving Information Sharing and Management).

A previous presentation on this same project is at http://www.slideshare.net/MarkHepworth/mh-lilac12-information-literacy-in-the-workplace

New knowledge creation within manufacturing #i3rgu

I’m at the i3 http://www.i3conference.org.uk/ conference in Aberdeen, Scotland (day 1). Jan Auernhammer (pictured right) talked about New knowledge creation within manufacturing: a pattern analysis of behaviours and interactions that underpin knowledge creation and innovation in a large German automotive manufacturer (a paper coauthored with Hazel Hall, Napier University, abstract here). Caveat: as I'm liveblogging, I may not have captured the authors' ideas correctly. He was investigating what organisastional context enables employees to work creatively. He looked at the organisational context, the larger processes (e.g. production processes) and how they affected the local context of people interacting. He collected data in 2007/8. He used autopoiesis as a research approach. Both quantitiative data (measuring organisational variables and administering questionnaires) and qualitative data (e.g. interviews and reflectuons on quantitative data) were collected.
From the questionnaire, leadership emerged as an important factor (e.g. how do leaders enable us to express ideas), as did motivation, the issue of shared values and the question of how much openness there was in communication.
A research outcome was pattern maps, with key factors and links between them. So for example, the vision for the organisation should both challenge and empower, so that people accepted the challenge to be creative. At an orientation phase there is the need for "Freiraum" (a free space to think and create - which means giving time and space). If the Freiraum exists then there is the possibility to generate and exchange creative ideas. Annother map captured individual innovation willingness. Elements within it included social reward, appreciation by leaders and a social "Freiraum" which allowed the expression of new and speculative ideas.
So the three elements to foster innovation in organisations that emerged as key were: structured routine working of experts (clear processes and understanding of what is being done), "Freiraum" for exploration, creation and prototyping of ideas (opening up the possibility of creative work) and (collective) innovation willingness (so new ideas are encouraged, not stamped on, and the idea can be brought into the "efficient" structured working of the organisation). Notably, there may need to be different management processes/style and information behaviour for the efficient "structured" working and the "Freiraum". The trickiness of producing and maintaining the requisite "Freiraum" was one of the things discussed after the presentation.
(added a little later) Thanks to Hazel Hall for the link to the presentation http://www.slideshare.net/HazelHall/i3-presentation-auernhammer-hall

Spanish language theses

Two new Spanish-language theses related to information literacy are highlighted by the Argentinian information literacy blog in this post (in Spanish). They were presented at the University of Granada (Spain) by Cuban doctoral students. At the moment the full texts are not available. In brackets are my guesses at the English translation.
- Propuesta de un modelo teórico para un sistema de organización, procesamiento y evaluación de la información en las organizaciones” (Proposal for a theoretical model for a system to organise, process and evaluate information in an organisational context), by Ognara García García. (I found this link to a fairly recent Spanish-language article on this research here)
- ALFINEV: propuesta de un modelo para la evaluación de la alfabetización informacional en la Educación Superior de Cuba (Proposal for a model to evaluate information literacy in higher education in Cuba), by Grizly Meneses Placeres. (I found a powerpoint presented some of her results, in Spanish, here and the corresponding short paper is here)
Photo by Sheila Webber: Winter branches, Sheffield, January 2011

Zotero

Back to a post about a session at the AULIC seminar in Bath on Monday. Zotero was a presentation by Joe Bennett, who teaches in the School of Music and Performing Arts at Bath Spa University and is also doing a PhD at Surrey University. Zotero enables you to manage your references and articles, is free, and is a browser addon for Firefox and a MS Word plug-in, to enable you to integrate it into your work practice.
Joe went through his requirement for a bibliographic/literature management package. This included ability to bookmark and archive web pages with correct citation; cloud-based storage of pdfs & capability to full text search (as his experience was that people didn’t usually get an article and read it all the way through, but rather search for particular things within them); no login/authentication to slow down study process; drag and drop compatibility with Google docs; extracting metadata from full text. He identified that Zotero met these requirements better than Refworks or Endnote and is free up to 100 MB storage (he pays a smallish subscription to have a much larger storage area; making it a “Freemium” (Free/ premium) business model). There was discussion about copyright issues (Joe stressed that this ability to store and search pdfs was really important to him and other researchers, and also said that whilst others could see and search his citations, he did not open up access to the protected material itself)
Joe has a blog Web 2.0 tools in teaching and learning at http://bathspaweb2.edublogs.org and this is the post specifically about Zotero
http://bathspaweb2.edublogs.org/2010/02/05/dropbox-and-zotero/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Carfax Hotel, Bath, June 2010