Coming to the Endnote of the line

Dear Void,

I was wondering recently why I hadn't used Endnote until now. Now that I'm trying to pull everything together, with a worryingly (extended) near submission date a-looming. I had been haphazard with my citations and referencing. And, yes, I KNOW that everyone kept saying to get that in place early but I couldn't remember why I hadn't. 

17:34 Wednesday. At my desk just now. Nearly home time.

When a post grad starts at USyd they don't get a dedicated space to work. No desk of their own, as such. What they do get is the chance to work in a space dedicated to post grads on condition that at the end of each day you leave the desk clear, no books to be left, no pile of papers, not even a mark to say you have dibs on the desk tomorrow. This practice has a very groovy name: hotdesking. Oh, yeah, baby.

Anyway, hotdesking, home with my mac, 3 trips overseas last year, (1 for a conference and two for research) meant I have amazing, interesting, joy-giving material everywhere. Organising the papers wasn’t a problem. Well, digital ones. The paper ones and books are staring accusingly at me from my desk, saying .we have good stuff in us too’. ‘Yes, material objects, you do. But it’s just not as easy to find it.’

I have a papers database system that I really like (Devonthink) that allows me to make annotations that then show them on a separate page, and amazing search functions which means I can find my sources easily. I had that on my mac and during lockdown when we couldn’t come onto campus and it allowed me to do all I needed. My thinking, of course, was that I’d ‘fix the citations all up at the end’. Don’t do this.

The very good news is that I’ve managed to get myself all Endnoted!! I took a zoom class last Friday. My one-on-one Endnote session with a librarian was then cancelled on Monday. So I went ahead and asked the internet to bring me the money! Or, if not money, then bring me information on how to use Endnote. And it worked. Just today, dear Void, I’ve linked Endnote to Word (this was not an automatic thing since Word was trying to find an earlier Endnote library I’d created way back when I’d had a dabble* (must have been when I was finally given a dedicated desk for my third year and we were allowed back on campus) with the program.

So, link fixed, and all the other information for how to get Word and Endnote working smoothly together given to me by very generous talking heads out there in the digital frontier. Below are links for  videos that helped. It takes a global network to raise a Doctor of Arts candidate. Sigh.

Thanks for listening, Void.

* I did try

PS. Another post grad student alerted me to the existence of Miro and I think I'm changed! Not sure how it'll help yet, but it's so pretty!

Here are the to a couple of videos on Endnote that really, and I mean really, helped. My recommendation is to take a workshop offered through your uni but do it at the beginning of your second year, once you have some material to work with.

How to Use Endnote in 5 minutes. This was a good overview but didn’t solve my linking problem.

Footnotes in Word (2013). This was the best. This helped me to realise that to create notes at the end is more of a formatting style issue in Word rather than something that Endnote does. The name threw me here. Thought that’s what it did.