Yes, it’s annoying, but at least the tag still serves the function of locating materials that it describes.

I’d love to hear more about your experiments with connotea and BibSonomy, and zotero.

Firstly, there is no loss or degradation of author-information, as I earlier thought. After accumulating a couple dozen test-citations, I exported my collection in 4 of the formats Connotea offers. I then studied them in a text-editor, and all the original author-details are fully intact. Project-lead Ian Mulvaney confirms this is the designed functionality.

There is additional info in the actual records which does not display on the Connotea site, but is plainly being gathered/retained.

On the Connotea site, author-info is displayed in a truncated form, but this is only for display-purposes.

The messy-tags complaint needs a closer look. Catherine says that by using a different tag-control (than I had selected) we can get individualized handling of tags. I hope so, and will follow her directions & explanation, but Ian Mulvaney agreed that tags are subject to ‘homesteading’ that fixes their capitalization. But, I am downgrading this issue to ‘mismatched socks’, even if it proves to be unavoidable at the present.

If the tags we input have not been used before, we can edit them easily, but if someone else has already entered “YOUNGER DRYAS”, when we enter “Younger Dryas” it automatically changes to the full-caps form. But I may not be editing from the right place, and will try Catherine’s advice.

I exported citations and Bookmarks in 4 formats, and scanned all of them (BibTex, EndNote, RIS and TXT). Connotea is supposed to be able to then import several of these, though the recommendation is to use RIS (the most widespread exchange-format).

I deleted my Connotea entries, and then against recommendation re-imported them using the BibTex export file. The transfer was not perfect, but my collection contained numerous ‘experimental’ entries, especially from sources that were not really citation-enabled (um, were not really citations). The well-formed citations all appeared to import properly and in several cases Connotea actively improved/corrected the citation. It appears to like BibTex.

I also made an account on http://www.BibSonomy.org, and then imported my Connotea BibTex export file. Again, not without casualties, but considering the ragged nature of some of my examples, no surprise. ‘Proper’ citations appeared to migrate flawlessly (or again, better).

I installed the Firefox extension Zotero. Unfortunately, when first started Zotero insists on accessing a Startup page on-line, which includes multimedia. I’m on dial-up, and that’s a show-stopper. I will try to find a way to stop Zotero from doing that, and continue investigating. It gets very high accolades, seems very serious, and even has documentation!

[Zotero's one-click install did not work for me. I right-clicked, Saved File As, then in Firefox I clicked the File menu, clicked Open File, browsed to the downloaded file, double-clicked it, and it installed.]

I recommend Connotea … and BibSonomy, and have now put in a session logged-in and making entries to both at the same time. After building a collection of duel-entries, I will then try a couple ways of mass-synching them.

Both these projects make a distinction between ‘normal’ Bookmarks, which they both allow, and entries that are intended to meet professional citation-needs. Connotea is very fast, easy & automated (especially on collaborating websites, which includes the web’s richest sources), while BibSonomy is the height of German academic rigor, with detailed record-editing exposed.

If I recall correctly, Zotero folks have been working on a central repository for some time — hopefully it’ll be out soon.

I have also started using the ‘competitor’-project, BibSonomy, together with Connotea.

The update details are in a new post on Connotea that Catherine has started, at http://library.duke.edu/blogs/libraryhacks/2008/05/13/connotea-another-look/.

Please go there for her response, and my update.

As just a link to a source on the Net, as a beefed-up on-line Bookmarks or Favorites, loss of name-info is no biggie, but as a way of gathering a personal bibliography, it seems like a degradation of key info.

It appears that tags are all shared by everyone, and if one gets goofed up, others cannot edit it. By the time I had a few dozen tags, a number of them were automatically changed to plainly malformed spellings & capitalizations. I entered “Younger Dryas”, and it immediately changed to “YOUNGER DRYAS”. Someone had entered Younger Dryas without quotes, so in the related-tags column there was Younger and below it was Dryas. So when we export, we will drag a bunch of messed-up tags into our next environment.

The only fields we can edit are Title, Description, and Comments. People are stuffing Abstracts into the Description field. Or maybe filling it out with their own comments. As a database record, the end result is not pretty.

I enjoyed using it and wish it performed better, but I could just see ending up with hundreds ragged & irregular citations, over-pruned author-info (and no institution-affiliation) … and continued my search.

Please send me an e-mail if there is a more current test & evaluation of Connotea - or a recommended alternative!