Pimping for the software

I have been absolutely swamped for the past couple of weeks by far more work than I've had time to do, both on my "day" job and in my consulting, so I've fallen badly behind in a number of things. Not surprisingly, then, I really didn't have time to do much in the way of preparation for this afternoon's scheduled presentation on how to use a bibliographic software I've been using religiously for the past couple of years to manage my reading notes.

I actually used the software for another purpose a decade or more ago, but when the university made it available to staff and students free, I realized that it might have good potential for storing reading notes in a handy, electronic format that I could access more easily than the clumsy hard copies I've tried to use for years. Turns out, it does a fine job.

More important, I teach technical writing, and one of my big challenges is getting students to read and cite papers as part of their research efforts. For many of the undergraduate projects, citing a half-dozen papers is often plenty; others need to cite many more than that, but they need a way to keep track of what they're doing so they can synthesize information and write responsibly. The graduate students need to build libraries of articles they can cite as they continue in their careers, and they need to be able to manage notes on those articles in a place where they can find them easily.

Enter dj. I happened to have written a paper recently that included a large number of cited references, but I had written the whole paper and formatted all of the citations at a rate of about 10 minutes for each paper cited, without even allowing any time to format the references. I was pretty impressed with how quickly that had gone, and I was eager to help my students be able to write (and cite) quickly.

Meantime, I have become really disenchanted with the references format of my students' professional organization. Giving the organization credit, they have made a more-than-valiant effort to develop a style guide that offers a great deal of useful information for the members about how to write clearly, but their references format is nothing short of a confused jumble. That doesn't work with either a bibliographic manager or with the alternative that seems more logical to me for engineers: a spreadsheet.

In the past few months, the organization has negotiated an agreement to make its literature available through an online library that, like many libraries today, downloads automatically into the bibliographic manager or to a spreadsheet, but neither of those works with the references style because of its inconsistencies. So I have waded through the style, figured out a way to make it substantially more consistent, and developed a knock-off format for our students to use. In an effort to help manage their notes, I also formatted a way for them to take notes in the software and print out formatted copies of the entries and their notes, all on a single file.

So I walked into my presentation today armed with an electronic library I borrowed from a student from last semester, the files to make my professional format work, a blank word processing document, and an internet connection to reach our university library. I sort of had some idea of what I wanted to say, but I didn't have a lot of fancy presentation slides.

The official moderator for the afternoon seminar was out sick today and I didn't have a microphone in a room designed for about 150 students, so I spent a moment getting their attention and introduced myself. I explained the topic, showed them how the electric library works, and then showed them how to use the software to format citations and references effortlessly. I had their attention; faces lit up and air sucked in as they realized that I really had spent all my time on my own paper writing rather than formatting references, and they saw that the tools could really work for them.

I had had some basic ideas in mind when I went into the meeting, but I ran out of those after about half the allotted hour, so I called for questions. Even though current and former students of mine were scattered throughout the room, only one of them said anything, and that was to help a faculty member with a problem the student had the experience to know how to solve. The rest of the questions were thoughtful and valuable, and I was really pleased to have what seemed to me like a meaningful, well-received seminar, in spite of my lack of planning and preparation.

And it didn't end when I went back to my office. A couple of students were waiting for me there with questions about their senior projects. I really haven't had much to do with the senior class (my coteacher has handled most of it), but early in the semester I had put them, kicking and screaming, through an exercise to set up the bibliographic software and some tools our library makes available that I have found handy.

By the time I had finished handling their projects, a third student had walked in, and I said something about having just talked to the graduate students about the software, noting that I had been able to tell that, to my surprise, I had been able to tell by the format of the senior papers that some of them had used the software, even without my asking.

The one of the three who had made the best grade on  his paper draft lighted up at the mention. Turned out he had set up the system as I had instructed, added some papers to his library, and used the notes format to develop the introduction to his paper—according to him, relatively painlessly.

I left the office smiling that the seminar had gone well and that my students were using the tools I had given them without even being told to. But I also wonder if the university is going to wonder if I'm pimping for the software company. I'm not, really, but I love being able to help make my students' lives easier—and I love it even more when I find out they appreciate it.