Sunday, June 08, 2008

DiRT: the Digital Research Tools Wiki This Wiki page will be of continuing value to researchers at many levels--students, instructors, and librarians. The purpose of the site is to provide short evaluative descriptions of useful software. The software is listed in categories (from Authoring to Mapping to Utilities for easy browsing. The resources are also searchable. ____JH (Via Jane Park's post in Creative Commons.) _____ "As digital information proliferates, researchers need tools to find, organize, manipulate, analyze, and share it. But how do you keep up with the hundreds of tools that can help you to be more efficient and innovative and find the ones best for you? Digital Research Tools (DiRT) brings together snapshot reviews of software that can help researchers--professors, students, think-tankers, teachers, librarians, corporate intelligence gatherers, and other inquisitive folks--do their work better. We do our best to keep our reviews clear and straightforward rather than full of jargon. We also group tools into categories so that researchers can identify relevant ones more easily. We cover a range of software, including tools to help you manage and share your bookmarks, create bibliographies, analyze and visualize texts, brainstorm, collaborate, collect data, etc. Although we generally prefer tools that are free (open source is even better), we also cover software that comes with a price tag (if seems to be worth the money)." "The Digital Research Tools team currently includes academic librarians with expertise in the humanities, science, and business. We welcome new contributors--contact Lisa Spiro at lspiro@rice.edu if you're interested." 9:47:18 AM    COMMENT []