Research

Despite a migraine, I've been fiddling with two pieces of reference management software as I pull together stuff I'd like to look at regarding spinning and history of textiles.
The first is Mendeley.  I like the web-based nature and I especially like the bookmarklet that allows for importing of references from webpages like Amazon or Web of Science or any number of other common research databases.  I also like the social-networking potential for sharing resources, citation lists, etc.  Unfortunately, it is very slow (at least for me) at the moment.  The bookmarklet can take ages to load.  I haven't imported old citation libraries yet (when I was more active in research as a graduate student and research assistant I typically used EndNote and haven't yet exported those old libraries).
Mendeley also interfaces with OpenOffice.  I haven't tried it yet, but I'm hoping it will be similar to the CiteWhileYouWrite function in EndNote which was a huge blessing for me as a graduate student.

I've also started playing with BibDesk.  After a few false-starts, I think I'm getting the hang of it.  I like it a bit better than Mendeley in some ways - it's faster and a bit easier to use.  I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of the internal browser for finding references, especially since GoogleScholar freaks out a bit and thinks I'm a bot if I do too many searches and imports.  I'm slowly getting the hang of creating new references and was very excited when I finally figured out the importing from clipboard feature which allows for highlighting, say, a bibliographic entry from a document or web-page works cited, going to BibDesk, highlighting the author name, title, etc., one at a time and telling BibDesk which is which.  Very, very cool.
I'm not sure if BibDesk integrates as well with a word processor, but I'm using both applications for the time being, so while it might be mildly awkward to keep them both updated with each other, it should be possible to generate bibliographic lists for printing or in articles.

Dizzy

Nice low-key day again today.  I went and bought some new reading material.   I'm shopping for spindles and spindle kits.  And while I'm at it,  I'm collecting titles of resources on the history of textile production, archaeology and textiles, and in particular textiles in the ancient Near East (and Egypt, for those who have decided that Egypt wasn't part of the Near East).  I'm hoping for a library excursion some time next week.
Partly this is out of curiosity - textiles were not really something I paid much attention to prior to getting interested in knitting and crocheting -  and partly with a vague idea of developing a continuing education course about textiles and the ancient Near East, possibly with a bit of hands-on fun with drop spindles and wool and/or linen.
Actually, I should amend the above - textile production was something I worked on for my BA paper long, long ago, but I didn't delve much into it.  I should probably dig that thing out again and have a look at it though...