I have long, loyally, supported Jabref - which is free, open source, sturdy and forgiving. Jabref is a graphic interface for a Bibtex file. We pick up our reference material from all sorts of places, with all sorts of encoding junk slotted in to it - but with Jabref we were able simply to ignore the junk, and stay true to UTF-8. Until now...
This makes it sound as if I know what I am doing... I am just a loyal, trusting, naive user...
Generally it is nice to see open source projects get active. But... A recent upgrade by the Jabref team has created major 'special character' problems. 'Special characters', like the special characters you find in Irish family names. French family names. Spanish family names. Portuguese family names...
And this happened at a bad point in my backup regime... I had let my guard down, I admit it... Jabref, sturdy and forgiving...
Suddenly I had a bibliographic database that was full of visible coding junk. I do keep back up routes open - through NYU I have access to Refworks, and I keep accounts open with Zotero and with Mendeley.
So, after thought, I took my Bibtex file into Mendeley, for a tidy up - and have rediscovered why I dislike Mendeley... First the good thing... That big clean screen has made tidying out the junk easy. My database needed a good preen anyway...
But Mendeley, Mendeley...
It has all been said before...
And this, by singer Kit Nelson, is really good - chewing those 30s/40s vowels...
Interesting to see, from the comments on Kit Nelson's page, that people now do this monologue for drama examinations...
Mendeley... Mendeley... Secretive and silent...
