[Eril-l] Is anyone using New refworks?

[Amy Lynn Fry]

This fall I started promoting the new RefWorks to new users and encouraging existing users to migrate. I sent an email to all RefWorks users whose accounts had been active in the last year or so (can't remember exactly) with migration information, set up new login links on our website, updated our LibGuide extensively, scheduled workshops, etc. It was very hard to figure out (especially the multiple signup options) and I had a lot of questions, but once I did that legwork, it has been going smoothly.

It's definitely not a perfect product. The import from our Innovative catalog still stinks, but we have Summon so I encourage people to just use that instead. I cannot figure out how to search from within RefWorks at all. I tried to share something with someone and it didn't work very well for me (might have been the user though). The openURL still works poorly, though there is a citation source link in each citation that will get you back very neatly to wherever you got the citation from (so you can link back to full text - I wish that was labelled better). There are still problems with things not importing perfectly - but that's to be expected because of the data available. I think it is much easier to use, though, and I'm glad we are moving towards the new product.

Here's my LibGuide, which may help you with some of your questions: http://libguides.bgsu.edu/RefWorks. Feel free to copy/adapt to your own institution.

Amy Fry
Associate Professor, E-resources Librarian
Jerome Library
Bowling Green, OH 43403
afry at bgsu.edu<mailto:afry at bgsu.edu>
email is the best way to reach me

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Diane Westerfield
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2016 2:08 PM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Is anyone using New refworks?

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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto:charper at vts.edu>
703-461-1794

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