I recently came across the STM Innovations Seminar Video Archive and I figured it would provide some good food for thought as we approach #btPDF2.

What follows are my notes and thoughts during Jason Rollin's (Thompson Reuters; EndNote, Reference Manager Dev Team) presentation "Bibliographic Management Software: Productivity Tools for Researchers" that took place in 2010.

His Key Points: 

Take Home

1) Help people do their work

2) Workflow is essential, dont disrupt it, dont add to it – integrate within their workflow, this is KEY

3) User Experience, User Interface – details are important and your customers will tell you when they dont like it. 

Although a self-promotion in the slide – An Ecosystem for a researcher, their world and their work is more effective than a silo

Overview of History

@ 7:52 Were we are now – hybrid models (web, desktop, mobile) – the focus is less on delivery platform, less on the technology – more really on making sure these tools are seemlessly integrated into the researchers workflow. 

Reference Management software has not seen a significant amount of annotation – despite number of tools and software – all have same core functionality. 

everyone now is focusing on the social, sharing, collaboration bandwagon – ie. citeulike.org

Synchronization across platforms – ie. Mendeley

Mobile Apps 

APIs/Extensions

Reference material evolving – data sets, multi-media

Opensource, freemium, propertary, paywalls?