Mendeley - not Manderley

Having some difficulty finding an article to blog about this week, I chose to investigate further a document management tool called Mendeley that was brought to my attention by a professor a few days ago. I found several blog entries about it, coming from varying disciplines with varying levels of investigation.

One entry, found on Savage Minds, an anthropology blog, very logically lays out the impediments of several different bibliographic softwares, coming to the conclusion that Mendeley works best for the author, probably a student or scholar, since it is "both a web application and stand alone desktop software". This means the tool combines the best aspects of Zotero, Sente, Evernote, and others. The blogger realizes Mendeley is still evolving but has high hopes.

Another post on Hanging Together, a blog written by OCLC/RLG staff, quotes an article from The Guardian and explains Mendeley's sharing techniques, comparing it to last.fm's profile building and recommendation system. The blog rightly assumes librarians will wonder how a "web application based on an entertainment model should have proved so much more attractive than the painstakingly built repositories we have been holding under the noses of our academic authors over the last several years?". This is answered by the fact that Mendeley runs statistics about who is looking at what paper, offers cross referencing and recommendation systems, and will integrate with programs like Zotero. "Mendeley has grabbed the attention of users because it understands what they like. They like simplicity. They like instantaneous results". Mendeley apparently very lightly touches upon copyright and metadata (using OpenSource ethics and 'change it if it's wrong' metadata concept), which means "the requirements libraries often put up front are almost dismissed as non-issues" by Mendeley.

Its real time editing abilities are what grabbed my attention. I'm not sure if users can actually comment on others' papers, but by posting pre-published papers, feedback on use will be available, at least. This is just another tool that is changing the academic scholarship traditions. I'm interested to see where this bibliographic tool goes in the near future, and if it delivers on the so-far limited yet excited hype. Maybe someone will upload Rebecca, and we can all go to Manderley. Easily.