Meredith has a great post on her research workflow over at Information Wants to Be Free. My research needs are a little different now that I am no longer working in an academic library. When I had access to scholarly databases everyday from my desktop, I was reading the literature far more regularly than I do now, and in a more systematic way. I was writing for publication more then, too. Yet with a major project coming to the end of its first stage next year, there will be a lot of writing to do on methods, impact, and results for a variety of publications. To get prepared, like Meredith I’ve been working on systems and processes to do this in an efficient way.

Workflow: Notes, draft text, calls for papers -> Scrivener. Web clippings and references -> Zotero. Mobile reading -> import Zotero references to Mendeley. Produce finalised article: ?

Scrivener I recently purchased Scrivener to manage all my writing projects in 2012. In addition to articles for the literature, I will also be writing a number of presentations and web content. Scrivener will allow me to write in small chunks so that I can easily reuse and rearrange content.

Zotero I have used Zotero to generate references for previous publications, but in recent years my library has become scattered, full of duplicates, broken links, and unsorted content. You can see the sorry mess at my Zotero user page. I undertook a project recently to reorganise everything but it is a slow process. Like many librarians, I have broad interests, and so my references range from UX to design, economics, development, and so on.

Mendeley I have been syncing Zotero to Mendeley so that I can use the iPad app, but while my Zotero library is so disorganised this is less than productive. I do really like Mendeley’s auto-renaming feature, fantastic for all those databases that think 1.pdf is a good filename. Zotero has this feature too, via a plugin, but it’s not as neat as Mendeley.

I rarely annotate PDFs, but I do have GoodReader and Mendeley installed on my iPad. I do use the highlights feature in Kindle. Quotes and additional references often end up in Evernote.

I had heard it said in the past that the sign of a good research paper is mostly original content, with fewer references as you keep writing and moving towards more original content in your papers. I have found this in my work – my first conference paper had about 30 references (!), my most recent journal article 5. On the flip side, I find this means I lack a good system for finding and reading new research not only to use in future papers, but just for current awareness. Here Twitter joins my workflow, as I follow users like DFID_Research (R4D) to pick up new papers on development topics.

What I am unsure of yet is how all of this will come together when I sit down to write next year. It strikes me that there are too many tools in my workflow. In the past, I have produced articles with Word and Zotero in a fairly linear process. With Scrivener in the mix, and not having tested the reference manager support option yet, I am not sure at which point I will have to jump out of these tools and over to Word. 52 Tiger discusses this problem.

A good topic for discussion, Meredith! I’d be interested to hear how people keep everything organised over time. I find it difficult to stay disciplined enough to tag every new item and to correct the metadata before something is filed away.

Sometimes, it’s the simplest of things that can become the greatest burden. In the mid 2000′s, a flurry of articles in journals appeared about the virtues of Personal Information Management (PIM), and how librarians could help with that. The idea being that as the amount of information in our lives continued to increase at a seemingly exponential rate, the anxiety faced to organise it effectively also increases until we are left with disorganised files, badly named files, and a lot of time wasted on trying to find things. We librarians often joke that the irony is that as much as we might seek to help others overcome this problem, we are ourselves amongst the worst at effectively naming and storing information – take a look at any librarian’s desk or files. In the last half-decade, PIM has become an industry of its own, with every new mobile phone announcement focusing on to do apps, reminder tools, personal information assistants (Siri), calendar apps, alerts, project charting tools and more.

The notion that a human professional can help you with that seems to have faded away. I’m not entirely sure why that is, when more and more people find themselves with thousands of digital photos that have no metadata whatsoever, to give just one example.

Yes, it’s easy to get carried away with productivity and organisation advice, and to procrastinate on actually working in favour of checking out the latest app or to do method (and I’ve been guilty of this too many times to mention) but there has been many a time when I would have sought out such a service at a library, if it existed. Libraries already offer a range of hands-on lab sessions, geek out days, petting zoos and more for a variety of topics including cooking, crafts, digital photography and computers – why not for productivity and getting organised (online and offline) too?

Does your library offer anything like this?

As for me, after spending several years battling document management and version control, I am both interested in and wary iof the shift to app-based file management, most significantly seen in Apple’s iCloud. I travel over 100 days a year, and in the past few months the iPad has become my go-to device on the road. Buying it has forced a shift in how I store information. Below is a screen capture of the apps I use for work. Using these apps, I can access all my notes, calendar (Agenda app is on a different screen), to-do lists, email, professional development reading, reference articles, bookmarks, documents and colleagues. There are many things that the iPad cannot do (writing complex documents or long emails with lots of attachments? Forget it), and things I need to workaround. However, this approach has forced decisions about where to store information (almost everything on this screen syncs via a cloud-based service) and started me on the path of dull but necessary tasks such as getting better at organising my email since Mail can only display a limited number of messages in the inbox.

One of the best meetings I have taken part in recently involved sitting down and deciding together how best to manage our folder schema and file naming. Basic, records management stuff, but it can so easily be forgotten. But incredibly helpful in deciding what and how to share files, and how to manage version control in lieu of a version control system. Have you had this conversation with your colleagues lately? If not, you might be surprised at how useful it is.

Thanks to Rob Styles, I now have a Twine account and have been finding my way around this new Semantic-powered world.

There has been a great deal of discussion about Twine, from the supportive to the disappointed there’s a wide range of opinions about it. Bearing in mind all of this, I am trying it out with an open mind and a commitment to pass comments and feedback to the developers.

As I explore Twine I’m keeping in mind the things that interest me about the Semantic Web: the potential for trust, relationships and more targeted results and information. So far, I think it has a lot of potential.

Starting out: Social networking upside down

If you use many social software sites, like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, you’ll be used to building a network of contacts based on people you know. Twine, at least for me, is the opposite approach. You begin with your interests and connect with people based on shared interests or Twine will recommend people to you. Starting with interests is perhaps a bit more like 43 Things. Note the wording – Connect not Friend. This makes me more likely to reach out and connect with people I don’t know, which is important especially on a new service with a (as yet) limited user base.

Recommendations

I’m not sure how it’s being powered, but once you have started to make connections and groups (called Twines) recommendations will appear for other people and Twines to connect with. It is too soon to tell how powerful this might become, but if it is really focused on it could become very valuable. For example, I’d like to find people who work in NGOs in Europe who are interested in web development. While a keyword search could pull up such a result, a Semantic approach might be able to give me a more accurate recommendation.

Starting a Twine

I started a twine on travel to try out linking and connecting interests. You can then invite others to join, add notes and post items to the Twine. This is a feature that is highly promoted. The idea is that you will be able to use Semantic-powered search to locate your item again and find other recommended items.

If you know del.icio.us, Connotea, CiteULike and another number of bookmarking services then you know how this works. Add a bookmarklet to your browser, find a page you like, and add it to your Twine, send it to a friend or save it for yourself. The popup window does need a bit of finetuning at this stage, as once you have more than a few connections or Twines it can be hard to see what you are adding an item to.

Interest Feed

All the actions you take in a Twine, or actions of others are added to your Interest Feed, much like the news feed in Facebook. You can control somewhat which notifications appear there, which is good because it quickly overflows with responses to discussions, new posted items etc. This can also be emailed to you daily but no RSS yet.

Definitely Beta

It’s clear that this really is a beta. There’s navigation inconsistency, search bugs, and incomplete features. But I am sending feedback through the feedback and beta Twines as I see things. It’s the first time I’ve really felt that I’ve had the opportunity to do that, and to do so easily. Most other ‘beta’ sites are of the perpetual beta sort and do not make giving feedback easy.

Do I see Twine taking over from my del.icio.us account? For the moment, I’m going to use both and evaluate them soon. For me, apart from the social bookmarking angle of Twine, what I am most interested in is recommendations and I am interested to see whether del.icio.us’ tag based approach to discovery or Twine’s Semantic push approach works better for me.

Twine has a lot of interesting features, and I like that they are really taking on board feedback. I received good comments about my first bit of feedback yesterday (request for OpenID in profiles and deduplication of posted items in Twines) and this does encourage me to send in more.  I’ll give a more detailed review soon!

Read/Write Web reports that Yahoo will begin indexing RDF and a range of Microformats. This is big news. It’s the first big sign that established, large players in search are including the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web has been under development for years, and now we are starting to get to the top of the mountain and see over it to where we can go with all these new standards and tools.

Yahoo has outlined what they will be supporting initially, and it’s a pretty big list -

In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.

Yahoo has had some support for this already (check the review of Operator below) , but perhaps this will be just the push many website developers need to include Microformats in their sites.

Microformats?

They are a structured way to make use of open content on the Internet. If you would like to see what Microformats have the potential to do, check out the Microformats site. A practical way to try this out is to install the Operator plugin for Firefox. When enabled, if you browse a site that makes use of, for example, hCard, you can right click and download the data or use the toolbar to perform lookups on other sites. Having used Operator, in some ways Yahoo’s announcement about their support for the Semantic Web and Microformats is not such a surprise, as many of the sites mentioned below are Yahoo or Yahoo-owned.

Using Operator

Here I am on Twitter – using Operator I can export and save my hCard contact information, bookmark, or, here’s the really nifty part, add it to my contacts (if I was using Yahoo! Contacts, that is).

If I’m in Upcoming and see something I want to go to, I can add it to my Google or Yahoo calendar. Here’s an event I’m actually going to -

With a click it’s in my Google Calendar -

So why is this cool? I didn’t have to type a thing, or run a search. With Microformats I can extract information out of webpages, find related stuff, save details for later, in a really easy and time saving way.

How might libraries make use of it? How about quick downloading of records and citations out of catalogues and databases into other sites, an article or even into your mobile phone without having to go through painful export options? One click to store? I’d like to see that.