"Collecting material for a bibliography is something which appeared to require an amazing amount of drudgery."
Richard Cameron, creator of CiteULike
This exercise was harder than I thought it would be--I really didn't want to register for yet another web site, and a lot of the categories didn't seem of interest to me. Then I discoverd CiteULike--which looked vaguely familiar. I think I've stumbled across it in the past while surfing.
What did you like about the tool?
What were the site’s useful features?
It's a service to help academics to share, store, and organise articles & papers found on the web. "When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser...you can export your library to either BibTeX or Endnote to build it in to your bibliography...links to the papers...papers themselves stay in archives like CiteSeer or PubMed."
"CiteULike is a free service, and will remain that way. You will always be able to manage your own personal library, and view other libraries on the site at no charge. The central database is backed up every fifteen minutes, and the information in your library is safe and secure."
Looks like tagging is going on--not sure how much is official descriptors imported from the original source and how much the user can add on his/her own. Cool feature--on the right is a list of "most active tags" with relative importance indicated by size & weight of type.
The downside:
"At the moment the database is dominated by biological and medical papers, but there is no reason why, say, history or philosophy bibliographies should not be equally prevalent." The other downside--it's a labor of love by one person. If he gets hit by a bus, you're screwed. Also, there are some problems linking to full text content not on the free web, but there's a discussion on the lengthy FAQ page (from which the material above is quoted) of possible ways to get it to work if one's institution uses a proxy server.
Could you see any applications for its use in a library setting?
Certainly might be something individual librarians and others might use, and something to tell our students and faculty about. I confess I haven't had time to test it out in detail (nor will I) but it looks promising.
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