I've been using EndNote for a couple of years now to organize my research.
Although it's billed as a bibliographical software (and does indeed
fulfill that function exceptionally well, with great flexibility for
automatically formatting both citations of all kinds, and bibliographies)
it also functions very well as a knowledge management software, withe
extensive spaces for notes, links which remain live through the life of the
library.  I love the flexibility of cite while you write function, which
inserts correctly formatted footnotes, endnotes etc. and also adds each
source to an alphetabized bibliography as I write. And its possible to
search any EndNote library via many routes - author, subject, keywords
defined by each EndNote user, etc.

I first used it, after years of prodding from a colleague, when he showed
me that I could actually write in each entry where I had filed the source
- either via a relative link on my personal computers, or a URL, or a text
tag, like "orange folder, bottom shelf, bookshelf by door of study" which,
for an eclectic, passionate but basically disorganized researcher such as
myself, was a huge gift.  Oh, and it's also possible to download
references directly from major libraries' online catalogues and commercial
research databases.

Now I keep one big library, into which I enter all the books and articles
I read, whatever the subject, leisure, pleasure, creative or professional,
movies, music, web sites, softwares, etc. etc. I'm often surprised by the
connections I uncover between quite distinct areas of my creative and
professional lives via EndNote, and I'm now involved in a project to teach
the software to first-year university students, as a tool of integration
which they can use throughout their academic careers.

Wow - I didn't realize I was quite so enthusiastic until I wrote all that
down.  Hope this helps,

Lesley Smith

PS EndNote arrive with a huge manual, but it's possible to work out the
basics to being building a library and using Cite While You Write very
quickly

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Sue Thomas wrote:

> I'm posting this query to the list and also to Tipmonkies
> http://www.tipmonkies.com/
>
> I'm just starting a big book project which is going to take me five years
> and will involve an extensive bibliography and an awful lot of footnotes.
> Worse, it will be a multimedia bibliography which so far is spreading across
> bloglines, furl, and del.icio.us as well as all kinds of other websites and
> print media.
>
> What I would like is some kind of template - online or offline - where I can
> collect my growing multimedia bibliography in an orderly fashion, and in
> established format, MLA or whatever.
>
> An important function I'd like is one with fields which retain the correct
> formatting for each entry, i.e. Automatically generating apostrophes around
> certain kinds of titles, or making them italic or underlined, etc. Doing
> that kind of formatting is the most tedious part of the job, so a record
> which only exports as plain text, for example, wouldn't be much help because
> I want to be able to then paste references into footnotes and also generate
> or paste the whole list into a Word doc when I need to - and keep the
> formatting at the same time. A tall order! But I always end up with
> references all over the place and this time I want to start off on the right
> foot.
>
> I started creating this in Excel but realised it would be sensible to find
> out whether someone has already done it first - does anyone have any ideas?
>
> oh, and I am Mac-based :)
>
> Thanks
> Sue
>
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