The evolution of research

This is the subtitle of an exhibition at the British Library. Called “Growing Knowledge”, the exhibition seeks to answer the following questions:

  • How have digital technologies changed research?
  • What are the new challenges they pose?
  • What role should a research library play in the 21st Century?

I’ve been exploring the website, and it seems quite interesting. There are a few ways in which people can take part in the research, and there is also a page of useful tools for researchers. I’ve heard of most of these, eg Evernote, but there are one or two that are new to me. One of these is Mendeley, which is a tool for generating and sharing research information. What especially appeals to me about it is this:

Our software, Mendeley Desktop, offers you:

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    • Automatic extraction of document details (authors, title, journal etc.) from academic papers into a library database, which saves you a lot of manual typing! As more people use Mendeley, the quality of the data extraction improves.

As I’m currently doing some research into Learning Platforms, I am hoping that this will prove to be quite useful.

There’s lots more to explore on the site, and the exhibition itself is almost certainly going to be well worth a visit.

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