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I've been tidying up my Mendeley library, checking on citation formats, organizing readings into folders, attaching my annotated PDFs, and experimenting with what happens to annotated Diigo web pages when added to the library.  (BTW: the Diigo/Mendeley part really works! I don't know why I am surprised by this, but I think this level of integration is cool!  For example, I accessed a recent column from The Chronicle of Higher Education, highlighted important points using Diigo, and then added the link to Mendeley.)

Other aspects of building the Mendeley library have not been so cool. I have tons of reading material related to my frameworks, previous coursework, and past lit reviews that I eventually want to add to Mendeley, but, for the time being, I decided to to focus on the material at hand: the several journal articles, research studies, and book chapters required for EP604, "Digital Tools for Qualitative Research."

Basically, I began by creating an EP604 folder inside Mendeley Desktop.  After I read and annotate an EP604 PDF using an iPad reader app, I "flatten" the annotated version and send it to my Dropbox, at which point I rename the PDF using a standard format of "author_year_annotated." From Dropbox, I can quickly add the PDF file to Mendeley Desktop.  (I will explain this process in more detail in a future post, including my final verdict on which iPad annotator I like the best.)

Once inside Mendeley Desktop, things aren't so efficient and seamless. I don't know if I am missing something, but I have found it necessary to manually add most of the information about each EP604 course document.  This takes as much time as if I was using any other citation management software, and my data input abilities are always error prone. Occasionally, the information for articles from online journals will automatically "pop up" in the reference fields, but more often than not, I must painstakingly enter the title in the right APA format, along with author, year, volume number, issue number, and so on.  

The automatic DOI search feature does work efficiently for filling in reference information for items with an available DOI.  But I can't for the life of me imagine why I would have the DOI number on hand, unless I locate the document myself on the Web, such as with Google Scholar or a library database. For the current task at hand, this represents a major duplication of effort, as all the course documents were supplied via the EP604 course management site.

Insofar as managing references, I obviously (and mistakenly) expected Mendeley to magically deliver me from the tedium of manual entry.  Clearly, I have to lower my expectations and take comfort in the fact that the time I invest now in maintaining my library will pay off later when I need to generate a list of works cited.

So, why use Mendeley at all?  Why not stick with Zotero, which I have used in the past, or try EndNote, which is supported by my university? Well, I am just deeply committed to this idea of controlling my own database both from within the cloud and locally on my computer, even if I have to pay a little extra for more server space. (I am currently using close to 15 percent of my free 500 MB after just two weeks.)  

More importantly, I am intrigued by the give-and-take between Internet as an act of research and Internet as source of research.  I am also curious about this persistent theme in EP604 that suggests digital technologies are supporting conventional research practices but also changing them.  I think Mendeley possibly exemplifies all of this.

The July 19 Mendeley webinar for educational researchers, for example, emphasized that Mendeley was more than a citation manager.  The presenter referred to it as  "a crowd-sourced, publicly searched catalog of research." The Mendeley web client functions as a "collaborative platform." As researchers search for, share, and retrieve data, Mendeley aggregates the "community's processes," supplying readership statistics and disciplinary trends back to its members.

Moreover, according to its developers, Mendeley is highly individualized to fit the "idiosyncratic processes of researchers."  It supposedly has seven different ways to add documents and is compatible with more than a 1000 citation styles!

As I listened, I wondered about Mendeley as a place for self-publishing and dissemination of research.  If the Mendeley community were to grow exponentially, becoming some sort of scholarly version of Facebook, would community members simply bypass the "old guard" of peer-reviewed research journals? Talk about changed practices!

I would love to continue to explore these big ideas, but for my EP604 skill-building project, I also need to attend to some practical concerns that have come up for me in recent days:  

• If there are indeed seven different ways to add docs to Mendeley, perhaps I need to keep practicing until I find the most efficient way?
• I am interested in the TPACK framework for technology and teacher education.  I want to find out if there is a Mendeley group for TPACK.  If not, should I start one?
• Would it be possible to integrate Mendeley with this blog in some way?  Is that advisable? Does Mendeley provide member badges? It's worth a look-see. . . .

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