Re: Reference software

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3704

Posted by graham.smith
2005-08-10 06:26:40

Alx,

I have no experience of Reference Manager so cannot do a comparison.

I was put onto Library Master through the Nota Bene user forum.

Although Nota Bene has an excellent built in bibliogaphic program, some of the members also used Library Master, and were very enthusiastic about it. The basic argument being that you could customize everything aspect of the program. And indeed what you get with LM is a semi-relational data base that happens to include a dedicated bibliogaphic facility. It also comes with a sample Address book data base and a good manual on editing and creating databases.

All told however, it is in fact a rather old fashioned program, and uses the clip board to insert the citation tags into any program you choose.

With Brainstorm I tend to keep LM and BSW visible on the screen at the same time. Searching in LM is very fast, Ctrl+M copies the citation tag of the selected reference to the clipboard, and then back in BSW ctrl+V pastes it into BSW. Which then happily moves into Word.

Again it is rather old fashioned in that to convert the citation tags to citations and build the bibliography, LM converts the Word doc into RTF and then rebuilds it with the bibliography. So you end up with two files. Once common practice of course, but now a fairly primitive approach, and no where near as nice as the cite-while-u-write approach of Reference Manager or Nota Bene. Having said that cite-while-u-write lured me away from Library Master for a spell and I bought End Note 8, but I am back with Library Master.

It is physically small and will run from a USB drive. I see that my Library master directory is 10MB and my EndNote 8 directory is 60MB.

Direct technical support is good, but not on par with Brainstorm or Zoot, and the users forum is all but dead.

I have also had issues with some diacriticals as LM seems to assume you are using a US keyboard. Having said that I see you can set it up to use Greek as your default language.

The LM demo comes with a 400 page PDF manual, and a tutorial so you can get a good idea of how it works.

There isn’t a lot to say about Library Master, it just works, its very fast, very flexible and rather old fashioned. However, I would expect an update to LM fairly soon.

Graham

Back to archived message list