L&LR staff blog

We’re getting another spate of queries across the desk, and sent to RefWorks@lincoln.ac.uk, from students who are confused (understandably) about the procedure for logging in to RefWorks or Write-N-Cite when presented with an unhelpful and baffling ‘RefWorks login center‘ screen asking for a ‘Group Code’. That ‘Group Code’ is a red herring. We don’t use [...]

For more than a year, I’ve been meaning to resurrect my website of tips & tricks for reference management. I finally got around to doing so today, with a new video tutorial about sending references to a RefWorks account from the University of Lincoln Repository. You can see it at – http://refworks.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/ Last July, inspired [...]

In January* this year, I drove through the snow to Milton Keynes (my first-ever visit), to the OU / Telstar workshop: Innovations in Reference Management 2010 (IRM10). Owen Stephens (Open University) comprehensively blogged and videoed the whole event, and it was fairly well discussed on Twitter, so I won’t attempt to provide a full report on all the [...]

As threatened, I was at BCU in Birmingham a week ago (30th Nov) for #middlemash. The morning after the official mashed library Pre-conference Networking Activity (PNA), a good few of us met on the train up to Perry Barr railway station near the campus. I’m not going to do a chronological write-up of the day [...]

I’m at Birmingham City University on Monday for mashed library event No.3, a.k.a. #Middlemash. I’m giving a lightning talk in the morning covering the work we’ve done on using RefWorks to create new-book RSS feeds; I’ll also be trying to raise interest around Joss’s and my project to develop WordPress MU as a platform for [...]

It appears that the campaign to increase our RefWorks reach is having a positive effect (graph for impression only; no numbers): N.B. #1 – the total number of RefWorks accounts in current use – i.e. our ‘share’ – has doubled since last year, thanks to a relatively huge number of new accounts created this year. [...]

Kudos to Social Work (i.e. Kev!), for being the first to use one of my formatted RefWorks books feeds in anger – see below a screenshot of Kev’s Social Works new books feed embedded into a live Blackboard site using feed2js (click for bigger): If you have created your own feed, could you please: Let [...]

I’m writing this here because Julian asked for a reminder on how to do it (I had to remind myself first!) and thought a permanent record in the blog would be more useful than an ephemeral email. Also: I’ve an idea that it may be useful to combine this with my process for creating new [...]

I’ve shown a couple of people this idea that Julie and I have been developing for Holbeach – that of using RefWorks to manage a new-books list for the relatively small number of new titles that we receive each year at the campus LRC – and that can be embedded into Blackboard or a subject web page. [...]

Following up on my last RefWorks post. On Monday I had a phone conversation with Stephanie Faulkner, client services manager for RefWorks-COS. We discussed my desire to increase our ‘reach’ (currently 5.6% of the University are active users), and Stephanie went through some ideas, based on what the top 50 worldwide RefWorks-using institutions have found successful. I’d [...]