Reference management

When I was studying for my library course I spent a lot of time and energy manually creating references, so I can see the attraction of using a programme to do it for me. Being a bit of a cheapskate, I immediately discounted Endnote and RefWorks because I would have to pay to use them. Zotero looked promising, but I eventually decided to go for Mendeley, which I became aware of after following the link to the CUL e-resources page. 
I chose Mendeley for a number of reasons, including the fact that, unlike Zotero, Mendeley offers an app that I can download to my iPod Touch. In addition, Mendeley offers 1GB free web storage space compared to Zotero's 100MB, and also allows annotation and highlighting of pdfs. This handy table gives a clear view of how Mendeley compares to other reference management systems.
Having signed up for Mendeley and downloaded both the web importer and the desktop version, I began to create a library of articles. The interface is attractive and user friendly, and the basic process of adding articles and documents seems to work very smoothly, although I must admit, I haven't had time to test the functionality in a systematic way. References can be organised into folders and tagged for easy retrieval. The desktop version interacts with Word to allow you to generate citations directly from your library. Below is a view of one of the folders in my fledgling library:

Lots of papers can be searched for from within Mendeley itself, and you can also add a button to your browser's toolbar which allows you to import documents and references into your library from many different databases. Mendeley also emphasises collaboration in research - researchers can set up public or private groups to share documents and ideas. If I decide to work towards further library qualifications in future, I'm sure this programme will be of great assistance. There are a number of ways it may be useful in our library too. For example, we could create a bibliography of the reference books we find useful when cataloguing rare books and music, to ensure that this information survives staff changes, and we could also create lists of the texts we draw upon when setting up exhibitions, so we can easily find them again in future.  I am sure there are many other potential applications.