Endnote Web is a familiar and not-at-all-loved thing for me already. It's flakey (and not in a nice Cadburyish way) and has caused me much angst in training sessions when it suddenly decides not to work at all unless I sacrifice a goat in the room before-hand. It may, however, have proved useful for any theatre students thinking of a career in acting - it's not every day that they get to study closely somebody turning purple, with foam coming out of his mouth.
So, to Zotero. I've heard students mention the name, but nobody has been so enthusiastic as to make me particularly want to try it, so 23Things is (cliche alert) again proving to be the tipping point. Installation was easy enough, and I like the simple way of grabbing references out of our catalogue. JSTOR is mentioned in one of the help documents as a database which talks to Zotero, and so it does. Total failure, though with Business Source Premier and Project Muse. Attempts a couple of hours apart gave me the same error message, which linked me to a page of known problems. Un-nervingly, the list includes Springerlink & Science Direct, so already I've lost 4 of my major databases. Further problem attempting to install the word processor plug-in - Firefox tells me that the plug-in is there, but no toolbar is appearing in Word. Perhaps I'm not technically savvy enough to make this work, but then nor are lots of our students.
Endnote has presented me with plenty of equally annoying challenges, and perhaps these are temporary problems, but as with the Diigo / Delicious choice, I needed a more positive experience to make me dump Endnote and migrate. Why swap one box of problems for another? Of course, the elephant in the room is Refworks, an option which is apparently not open to us.
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