the new internet part two

I'm back in the belly of the beast, the synchrotron. and so continues my reporting from the exploration of the new internet:

another thing you can do with the new internet is use it to store bookmarks, quickly store and organize your bibliography, and share these things with other people, either everyone on the web or only the ones you want.

If your job includes working with bibliographic references you have been as amazed as me to have witnessed the amount of help the internet has contributed to making this part of our job easier. I'm old enough to have had to use the citation index in the library during my undergrad thesis, then to have to manually type in each entry in a reference sofware during my PhD and more recently to use this software to search references on the web and include them automatically in my documents (and format the bibliography according to each publisher's specifications !). Now it's all on line (and sometimes free, yei !), you can store and share your database on the web. One of the advantages is that you have immediate links to all the papers citing or cited by that article, the 'related papers' features, supplemetary materials and so on.
The information is out there, you just have to know how to take advantage of it: organize it, keep track of it and make sense of it. There is so much !

So for bibliography I have found endnoteweb (sometimes free, depends on your affiliation), connotea (always free, you could theoretically link in an article from any page, while endnoteweb works through web of knowledge, but it doesn't always get all the citation data), reference manager (never free as far as I can tell, have not tested it online).

For storing bookmarks there are loads out there, they can be helpful in finding some interesting sites you were not necessarily looking for. The most popular seems to be del.ico.us, you can tag your bookmarks and see what other people are bookmarking. Digg appears similar, it's like you can vote for the sites you find interesting, and add comments, if you have time to kill you can start there. The google toolbar lets you store bookmarks that you can access from any computer, but that only works in IE (blah).

So what would happen if one day all the internet connections went down thanks to a massive power outage (or something similar?). You better back things up... especially your bibliography.

my turn again in the hutch, I just love the smell of ozone in the morning !