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Category Archives: Tips & Best Practices

ASIS&T Career Panel

I was recently asked to participate in a panel discussion related to careers in information and computing technologies by the University at Albany student chapter of ASIS&T. I’m making my slides from the talk as well as a PDF of my disciplines model available for anyone who may be interested.

Programming Style Guide

Every programmer and programming language has a preferred variation on how to format code. Here are my best suggestions for the languages I tend to code.

Endnote: Create a key binding for linking to a PDF (OS X)

I spend a fair amount of time linking PDF documents to records in Endnote. Unfortunately, Endnote requires you to (a) drag and drop, or (b) navigate into submenus to link to a PDF. In OS X, you can bind a keystroke to any menu item in a specific application using the System Preferences > Keyboard [...]

Commenting on Student Writing

We often find ourselves commenting on students’ writing and acting as editors rather than critical readers: we indicate line-level edits, such as missing commas and poor word choices– as if fixing the mechanical errors would make the paper acceptable. In reality, most student papers we see are first drafts, often written the night before the [...]

Read Like a Graduate Student, not a Mystery Fan

First year graduate students often struggle with the volume of reading required. It’s not uncommon to have assigned hundreds of pages a week on a range of topics. The typical course may cover the contents of a half-dozen books and 75-100 academic papers. All of this you’re meant to consume, understand, and synthesize with everything [...]

Endnote: Save PDFs of web pages and online articles

Endnote is primarily intended to help you store citation information and create bibliographies for your academic papers, but it also allows you to collect PDFs of the documents. This is helpful for journal articles, and fantastic for dynamic content. When reading online articles or web pages that you might need to cite, print to PDF [...]

What I Look for in a Camcorder

There are many versions of camcorder available, each with benefits and shortcomings. I most often use camcorders to record interviews, focus groups, and other events from a fixed vantage point. So, your needs my may differ significantly from mine.

Write Like a Graduate Student

While talking with a friend recently about his writing, he confessed that he didn’t know any other way to write. He asked me to show him another way and I’ve decided to take him up on the challenge.

Endnote: Store quotations

One of the most time consuming tasks of writing is finding that perfect quotation, finding that page number where an important idea was introduced, etc. By recording what you believe to be valuable (citation-worthy) quotations in your Endnotes records, you can quickly search them and cite the page. I store quotes in the “Custom 7” [...]