[Eril-l] Is anyone using New refworks?

[Harper, Cynthia]

I just experienced a failed attempt to roll out the new Refworks for our entering class.  I have been fighting technical battles all week, and was unable to prepare for the complications of citing book chapters, and identifying sample citations from my catalog that imported nicely. So the students reaction was - why try to use this tool?  "How did we form new priests before the Internet?" (snark).

A summary of the technical issues:

Z39.50 searching:
We had a working Z39.50 search in legacy refworks, but when New Refworks was set up for us, they created a new definition rather than copying the old one.  That one never worked properly, jumbling the titles. So when I asked them to fix it this week, they finally copied from the legacy definition and told me it would be shown in production today. No joy. Instead of getting one new version, now all my Z39.50 searches, including Library of Congress and other schools, don't work.

Drag-and-dropping PDF:
I didn't even attempt to show them this feature, because when I first used new RefWorks, I dragged in all my PDFs and the system went into permanent busy-twiddle.  When tah problem was corrected, I tried individual articles, and these did notparse well.

Creating new accounts:
I needed to have a method for valid VTS users who don't have vts.edu email accounts and are remote (DMin students) to create accounts, so I proxied the signup link. This required a SAN definition in my proxy security certificate. That got completed in time, thankfully.

Save-toRefWorks browser plugin:
Since I couldn't use Z39.50, I demoed using the Save-to-Refworks plugin.  There's no statement on the Proquest help libguide as to which browsers this works for. I had tried Firefox and Chrome. Students had less luck with Safari, IE, and other browsers.  Also, this plugin brings in very limited information from the catalog record.

Innovative catalog save to refworks:
The other instructor and I decided that the igamarole of saving to a file from the library catalog and importing into refworks was too cplicated, so we didn't show that. Too bad, since that provides the best parse of the data. (I was counting on Z39.50 search being available).  I had to modify our III catalog definitions for what gets saved in these files, however.

Saving from ATLA Religion database:
This works OK, but I was too shaken by how badly my session was going to remember to show them this :\.

WriteNCite:
Too complicated to show them this on the first introductory session.

Since I didn't have writeNCite for bibliographies:
I realized just before the session that WriteNCite won't allow you to edit the formatted citation and bibliography in Word, so I quickly decided to show them creating their bibliographies right in Refworks.  Why do they have an option the says "Create BibliographY", and an option just below that that says "Quick Cite", which basically do the same thing EXCEPT "create bibliography" doesn't alphabetize the list?  I of course showed them "create bibliography" -it sounded like what they wanted :\.

Libguides:
Oh, yeah, whle I was working on adding this new resource to my A-Z list of databases, a feature in Libguides stopped working: you could no longer assign a Database type to the resource. So I had to re-do the way my Research Aids libguide page was produced.

Sheesh!  Is this a common experience with using products that are having ongoing development updates applied daily, as is the latest agile development practice?  Was I foolish to have decided that New RefWorks was ready for prime time?




Cindy Harper
E-services and periodicals librarian
Virginia Theological Seminary
Bishop Payne Library
3737 Seminary Road
Alexandria VA 22304
charper at vts.edu<mailto:charper at vts.edu>
703-461-1794

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