[Eril-l] Is anyone using New refworks?

Thu Oct 13 11:21:59 PDT 2016

We've moved in the sense of turning on the ability to make the new
accounts, but we aren't going to do the forced migration until we have to,
which we believe is December 2017.

Basically we're telling new users to learn just the New RefWorks, and users
like faculty and grad students who are in the middle of writing a
paper/thesis using the old one to stick with the old one to finish that
work first before migrating.

We are a Google Apps for Education site, so the New RefWorks support for
Google Docs was an important reason for us to migrate. Also the lack of WnC
support for the latest MS Office for Mac was a compelling reason for us.

We are still working on getting the Institutional login hooked in (I think
the delay is on our own IT dept side of things), and when that's working,
we will offer that choice too. According to support, users can switch their
account between the institutional login and direct Refworks account
whenever they want, even back and forth, so our long term plan is to
encourage the institutional login until they're close to graduating, and
have them switch it over right before they leave so they can still use
their RefWorks account even when their main campus "LDAP" account is
disabled.

We have run into some of the problems discussed below, especially the poor
performance on the new feature to drop a PDF and have it figure out the
citation from that, but the reasons above are enough for us to bite the
bullet.

Melissa Belvadi

On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Diane Westerfield <
Diane.Westerfield at coloradocollege.edu> wrote:

> Recently at my library, other librarians asked me why haven’t we moved to
> the new RefWorks. I hadn’t seen much chatter on the listservs and figured
> we’d transition at some point but not be early adopters. The problem we’re
> running into now is the “choose your Refworks screen” which confuses some
> folks.
>
>
>
> I’d be curious to hear if anyone has moved to it and what issues you
> encountered.
>
>
>
> Also, we noticed our current version of Write n Cite doesn’t work with
> Word in Microsoft Office 2016. I don’t know if the new version of RefWorks
> is any better on this front.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
>
>
> Diane Westerfield, Electronic Resources & Serials Librarian
>
> Tutt Library, Colorado College
>
> diane.westerfield at coloradocollege.edu
>
> (719) 389-6661
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] *On Behalf Of *Harper,
> Cynthia
> *Sent:* Thursday, October 13, 2016 9:36 AM
> *To:* eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
> *Cc:* Budde, Mitzi; Hess, Bradley
> *Subject:* [Eril-l] Is anyone using New refworks?
>
>
>
> 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
>
> 703-461-1794
>
>
>
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>
>

-- 
Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca 902-566-0581
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