On the 14th January 2010 the TELSTAR project organised and hosted the Innovations in Reference Management event. The event was live blogged at http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/telstar/tag/irm10/, and an archive of all related tweets is available at http://twapperkeeper.com/irm10

The event was written up for the Serials-eNews online newsletter (http://www.ringgold.com/UKSG/si_pd.cfm?pid=10&articleid=5145&issueno=212&xsection=Business)

Some of the attendees also blogged the event including:

• http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/2010/01/19/innovations-in-reference-management/
• http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/innovations-in-reference-management-part-1/
• http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/innovations-in-reference-management-part-2/
• http://libwebrarian.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/innovations-in-reference-management/

RefWorks will be unavailable on 2nd January 2010 between 9am and 3pm due to essential maintenance work. This means that key TELSTAR functionality including MyReferences will also be unavailable during this time.

 This presentation was given at the ALT-C conference on the 8th September 2009

Owen Stephens will be presenting a paper on the Telstar project at ALT-C in Manchester today. If you happen to be at ALT-C it’s at 10:55 in Room 4.204.

 Please let us know what Reference Management software is supported and/or recommended by your University by doing our (very short) survey (only 4 questions long)

 The new issue of CILIP’s Library and Information update is out now, and within a feature on the Open University library, TELSTAR is featured as a key way of integrating library materials and services into the university’s VLE.

See http://www.cilip.org.uk/publications/updatemagazine for more details (needs a login I’m afraid), or most libraries will have a copy of the magazine.

 A very interesting post by Joss Winn (University of Lincoln) on the possibilities of using Wordpress as a platform for scholarly publication is available at http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/08/25/scholarly-publishing-with-wordpress/ - including a mention of footnotes/endnotes and citations as requirements, and the WP-Footnotes plugin developed by Simon Elvery (http://elvery.net/drzax/more-things/wordpress-footnotes-plugin/). At the same time Patrick Murray John (UMW – University of Mary Washington) has created a Zotero plugin for Wordpress (details at http://www.patrickgmj.net/node/178)

 The Telstar project now has a blog at http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/telstar. The blog is intended to complement this website by providing somewhere to think aloud about the ideas and issues related to the Telstar project. The postings on the blog are mean to be part of a conversation about the project. Hopefully at least some of the postings will be interesting enough to stimulate some comment and discussion!

Neither had I!

See below and Inera Inc’s website http://www.inera.com/extylesinfo.shtml for more information.

eXtyles is an integrated suite of tools that allows editorial staff to work in the familiar Microsoft Word environment, simplifying the time-consuming and error-prone aspects of cleaning up, styling, and editing content. eXtyles enables users to:

• Mould Word documents into a standard style

• Automatically edit references to a preferred style

• Link references to PubMed and CrossRef NEW!

• Automatically correct references with PubMed/CrossRef data

• Check Harvard- or Vancouver-style reference citations

• Export valid XML from Word (NLM and other DTDs)

• Improve editorial quality and cut production costs

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

TELSTAR’s new Project Manager Owen Stephens wrote a piece for the JISC SSBR Newsletter about the project and how it is looking at the use of references in the learning and teaching materials and environments at the Open University. Owen also talks about what it is like to join a project midway and how with the help of a supportive team, anything is possible! Click here to see the full piece.