People remark I get excited over the weirdest things. They don’t say it as an insult, just an observation. However, I do get excited over the weird as well as the ordinary. As a library technician, nothing gets my geek on as something to make student’s lives a little bit more easier. By ‘easier’ I do not advocate dislocating brains to get the diploma or degree. I do advocate making the research easier, and by that I mean any tool to make it go more efficient. All through school I tweaked, tinkered, teared up my research process. I still have another round of school left in me for the most opportune time to go back.
If I do I will pay attention to bibliography apps.
A co-worker of mine showed me a bibliography app from his iPhone. It’s also good for iPod touch (I own one), and the iPad. For all the Android folks it does come as an app for those phones as well. It’s called Easybib and allows people to take a scan of the barcode on a book, choose their citation style (MLA, APA, etc.), and produces a bibliography ready to share with other or use in paper.
The app is also available for Android users as discovered by another co-worker. The demos nearly made me break out into a happy jig. After a little swooning, I started running down a mental list of people who would like to try it. What makes it even more attractive:
It’s free
Nothing gets a Manitoban lathered up, other than a Rob Lowe tweet, like the word ‘free’. While I swoon at first, my practical side asserted itself for any possible drawbacks like:
- It may not work with all books.
- Some individuals may have a preference for another bibliography app
- The apple item must be iOS 4 or later.
The most obvious draw back is what to do with articles and web pages. Other than a database like EBSCOhost generating a citation, a number of free websites like KnightCite still makes things more efficient. In the end no piece of software can put together a paper. In the end the most useful software looks the most human-check things over before handing a paper in.
Unpaused Life 