I buy into a lot of niffty and new things. Most of the time I try it and after a while I go back to my old way of doing things. Recently I stumbled on a new website that I am really starting to fall in love with. It is called F1000Workspace, and it's free.It is marketed to those doing scientific research as a way to keep track of research articles, communicate with colleagues, and write your papers faster/easier. However, after I watched the intro video it hit me. Oh wow! This could be so cool for genealogy research!!
The aspect that got me was the way it would put source citations into writing for you. We always preach about citing as you go, well this company put that in their sales pitch. It has over 7,000 types of bibliographic styles programmed, including the one we use (Chicago Humanities Style).
For the research aspect you create a folder for your research items (websites or uploaded PDFs) on your dashboard. From there you can annotate, create notes, collaborate with other researchers (yes!), plus get all this information on the go from a multitude of different devices.
I know, I know, it sound like Evernote. Well, it kind of is, with one big exception. It will suggest articles it thinks matches your research through your tags and search history. Did that get your attention?
Oh, and you can work on joint projects within the system. The chat logs are threaded so you always know where the discussion went and the corrections made are similar to a Google Doc so you know who corrected/worked on which sections.
Like I said, I just downloaded it and I am still working on all the features. Look for more blog posts about this cool new tool in the future. In the mean time check out these videos they made to teach out all about the product.
