I’m looking for some advice about using EndNote in a corporate/agency setting. If anyone is in or a similar situation as I am, any advice or insight is welcome.
For many years, my company has used EndNote in the following way:
- One library for each product we work on (200+ total)
- One user might need access to only one library; another user may need access to all libraries. (We have ~100 users)
- All libraries are stored on a network drive.
- Each library is used for multiple projects. Each project is handled by several users who need access to the library.
- We use customized reference types and styles.
We currently use X7 (but we have the X8 upgrade) and Word 2010 companywide at the moment. We have never used the online version of EndNote, nor have we shared libraries.
We have just recently found out that network drives are not safe places to store EndNote files, so we are looking for a different solution. We can’t have users using their own local libraries for everything because they’d all forget to share and the record numbers in papers would always be different. I think we are going to need to start using shared libraries and syncing, but I can’t envision how to use it since we have so many libraries, more than one per person. I was toying with the idea of one user (me) owning a giant library (probably tens of thousands of references total) with a group for each of our current libraries, and then sharing groups with individual users. Is that feasible or advisable? Are there other ways that would be better?
We routinely use Network drives. We have our libraries and folders copied nightly into a read only folder which are accessible to all users, but write protected (and you get a “locked” warning when you first open it). Then if someone wants to modify, they need to open the read-write parent copy and add or edit the records. The only pain, is that if someone has it already open, you don’t know whom. We have a realtively small group of users (5-10) so a quick email can suffice.
A lot of our users will use a small desktop copy, or a copy of the main library on their desktop, to insert references into papers. That solves the problem of locking people out of libraries, but it wreaks havoc with record numbers in papers. Also, many of our users don’t ever merge their changes into the main library. We tell them to do it, but we can’t force them.
Because of that, I was really hoping that library sharing and syncing would solve our pretty significant record number problem, but I can’t figure out how to make it work.
I only know that another thread on here discusses a glitch when a large shared library has multiple people adding records to additional groups, it appears to result in duplications not experienced by the “owner” of the library. That would need to be explored with the development team and tested I guess before I moved an entire organization to sharing the cloud library or shared groups in a big library. But one user can only sync one desktop library.
We use one big library. I do have it synced to the web, but everyone who uses my library uses it in the way I described, locally.