BibMe.com!

Surprise, another web 2.0 tool for students! Seriously, this actually looks very useful and handy. BibMe.com allows users to create bibliographies by searching internal databases of books, magazines, journals, websites, newspapers, etc. Initially I find the search feature to be limited and they are pulling their articles from FindArticles.com, which is certainly not going to meet the information needs of today’s college students and other researchers. However, I fully appreciate that it’s free and that it offers manual entry of bibliographic data allowing you to complete a bibliography. It’s also very simple to use and straitforward.

In comparison, NoodleBib is another tool geared toward students and offers much more in-depth tools and features and uses a wizard to help build each citation. Unfortunately I can see a student who’s expecting something fast and easy to get easily bogged down and frustrated. At my university, NoobleBib has been well received by our students which is a great thing and is hopefully improving their ability to identify sound resources for their work, but I can see the simplicity of BibMe and other freely available competitors to be an enticement for switching.

May 15, 2007 | Filed Under Libraries