Teaching Mendeley achieves the impossible – it gets users excited to learn about organizing and citing their research articles. However, introducing Mendeley to students and faculty goes well beyond assisting them with organizing their references. Students are particularly quick to see the benefits that its social networking features offer, including promoting collaboration, identifying key resources, and facilitating group work. There are benefits for librarians too – the information it provides on the use of articles can contribute to collection development or research into patterns of information as well as promoting librarian expertise.

As a free citation manager, Mendeley assists users in locating, and gathering citations and PDF‘s, from a built-in search engine, from most databases, including Google Scholar, or from other citation managers such as RefWorks and EndNote. It is compatible with almost all web browsers, and operating systems – there‘s even an ―App‖ for it, and integrates easily with word-processors to create accurate in-text citations and bibliographies using virtually any style guide.

What really makes Mendeley stand out is the collaboration it can facilitate. Users can open their collections of resources to the world or to particular groups. It is also a powerful discovery tool, leveraging Web 2.0 functionality to connect researchers to potential collaborators, locate articles that have interested others in the field, trace the use of one‘s own research, and identify usage patterns beyond impact factors.

The use of Mendeley can easily be included in workshops for faculty and students at all levels. Mendeley is free, user-friendly and effective; users are quick to see the benefits of time-saving, collaboration, and discovery Mendeley provides, extending the librarian‘s role from providing bibliographic instruction to supporting collaboration and helping users organize information.

This presentation will briefly describe Mendeley focussing on its teaching, productivity and collaborative features.

Don MacMillan.
Don MacMillan. University of Calgary

Don MacMillan is the Liaison Librarian for Biological Sciences, Physics, Astronomy & Mathematics at the University of Calgary‘s Taylor Family Digital Library. He provides course-integrated information literacy instruction and advanced reference and training services to students and faculty in those disciplines and conducts research on student learning, information literacy and the incorporation of scientific resources and technology in information literacy instruction.

He actively collaborates with various faculty members particularly in Genetics and Biochemistry to ensure that students have the opportunity to use various bioinformatics and visualization tools and databases to better understand the molecular and structural basis of genetically-inherited diseases.

Don has a BSc. and MLS from Dalhousie University and is an active member of ACRL‘s Science and Technology Section.