Upgrade StorageEasybib - 1000's of about to be stranded students ...
Good afternoon and happy Chinese New Year to all.
I'm not sure if any of you have been following the debacle that is EasyBib or not, but to put it in a nutshell, many schools and school libraries subscribed to Easybib Pro at what was a really reasonable rate and have recently been notified that they are about to suspend their services, and replace it with a product that will provide different functionality at around 4x the price, and if students want to keep their citations and the citation functionality they'll need to subscribe to it personally at $20 a year (which works out much more expensive than the institutional subscription). Their new scholar tool is not a citation tool, but more of an essay writing / notetaking tool and not at all what most of us teacher-librarians are looking for. We're all now scrambling around to find a replacement tool that is accessible and easy to use. (Personally I never hopped on the EasyBib bandwagon, and have consistently used Zotero and recommend that to everyone... phew).
To cut a long story short, that's leaving a lot of teacher librarians and those interested in fostering academic honesty in an easy and approachable way to the upper-elementary to end of high-school crowd at a loose end.
Not to mention the fact, that the students who have diligently been curating their bibliographies in Easybib are screwed, since Easybib only exports to Googledoc/word/ pdf, and after playing around for a while, the only efficient way of getting that into another bibliographic tool seems to be to get it into excel and then spend quite a bit of time parsing / converting text to columns, and then setting some kind of CSV to ris / Bibtex converter loose on it - not something I think the average 13 year old (or teacher librarian) will be in the mood to do / have the toolkit to cope with.
Looking at your threads on conversion and importing, my head is doing a bit of spinning and I was wondering if there was any kindly soul out there who could spell things out in words of one syllable in a way that multiple schools and their students could worm their ways out of the grips of a corporation turned megalomanic gone wild with their data intact and importable? I realise this certainly is not your problem and I'm asking for considerable goodwill for anyone to consider this task ....
Most elementary / middleschools seem to be using MLA with some high schools moving on to subject specific bibliographic styles (e.g. APA for psychology) as the students move up the ranks - so at the least an importable MLA converter would solve probably 80% of the issues ...
any suggestions?
I'm not sure if any of you have been following the debacle that is EasyBib or not, but to put it in a nutshell, many schools and school libraries subscribed to Easybib Pro at what was a really reasonable rate and have recently been notified that they are about to suspend their services, and replace it with a product that will provide different functionality at around 4x the price, and if students want to keep their citations and the citation functionality they'll need to subscribe to it personally at $20 a year (which works out much more expensive than the institutional subscription). Their new scholar tool is not a citation tool, but more of an essay writing / notetaking tool and not at all what most of us teacher-librarians are looking for. We're all now scrambling around to find a replacement tool that is accessible and easy to use. (Personally I never hopped on the EasyBib bandwagon, and have consistently used Zotero and recommend that to everyone... phew).
To cut a long story short, that's leaving a lot of teacher librarians and those interested in fostering academic honesty in an easy and approachable way to the upper-elementary to end of high-school crowd at a loose end.
Not to mention the fact, that the students who have diligently been curating their bibliographies in Easybib are screwed, since Easybib only exports to Googledoc/word/ pdf, and after playing around for a while, the only efficient way of getting that into another bibliographic tool seems to be to get it into excel and then spend quite a bit of time parsing / converting text to columns, and then setting some kind of CSV to ris / Bibtex converter loose on it - not something I think the average 13 year old (or teacher librarian) will be in the mood to do / have the toolkit to cope with.
Looking at your threads on conversion and importing, my head is doing a bit of spinning and I was wondering if there was any kindly soul out there who could spell things out in words of one syllable in a way that multiple schools and their students could worm their ways out of the grips of a corporation turned megalomanic gone wild with their data intact and importable? I realise this certainly is not your problem and I'm asking for considerable goodwill for anyone to consider this task ....
Most elementary / middleschools seem to be using MLA with some high schools moving on to subject specific bibliographic styles (e.g. APA for psychology) as the students move up the ranks - so at the least an importable MLA converter would solve probably 80% of the issues ...
any suggestions?
There are some approaches how to parse a formatted bibliography and receive some of the underlying data again, e.g. AnyStyle.io. I don't know how good this will work in your case and it can only work for information which are printed in the bibliography.
Is EasyBib supporting all possible CSL styles? Then you could also try the bibtex generic style.
Both approaches will result only in the fraction of the data which is used for the citation. I don't know what other data might be lost, e.g. annotation, collections, tags, links to attachments.