Telstar

This looks really useful and I am sure it has a great future, especially since it can work well with Moodle. I still like Zotero though myself, which seems very similar, and will capture references without DOIs ( no doubt Telstar will too). Zotero is also portable. So — much as I admire this system, and I will let people know about it, I think Zotero still works best for me. Unless you’d like to convince me otherwise ( I know a quick demo can’t cover all of it)?

Hi Dave – thanks for the feedback. I agree that Zotero is a great tool – I use it myself. I think the key thing we have done in this project is to integrate reference management tools into the learning environment, making them more accessible (I hope) to a wider range of students. When students need more powerful tools for reference management they are likely to move onto tools such as Zotero, RefWorks, Mendely, EndNote etc.

Although the recent press release doesn’t focus on the other aspects of the project, we have also developed tools for those writing course material to capture references and integrate them into their course material in such a way that links to online versions of texts can be added automatically (using DOI and other data), and any references added to a course in this way can be exported to the students personally library, preserving any annotations and ensuring the students get good quality references.

Finally we have also written a toolkit (currently in draft at http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/telstar/remit-toc/) which looks at the issues around delivering reference management tools to students – if someone were to take this work and show how Zotero or other tools could be exploited in this way, that would be really great.

P.S
Who selects the ‘references’? The course teams or each tutor? Not clear from the demo

Looks really good and should make referencing a lot quicker (for me anyway!!). Hopefully it will be available soon!