Dorothea over at Caveat Lector has been making some observations about usability (on More Stupid Opac Tricks and RefWorks and Usability) lately that resonate with my own experiences over the past year working with RefWorks and revamping an OPAC.

Having just transitioned to a new OPAC, I served on the committee that was responsible for the look and feel of the design, and although I wasn’t really expecting much, I was still disappointed that the tools the vendor gave us to customize the OPAC only enabled us to make minimal cosmetic changes. Some automated warning messages that the system generates make little sense to this librarian (I can guess what they mean) so I can’t even imagine what a user would make of them.

RefWorks is a great tool that should be easier to use. I think what Dorothea was saying in her post about having to tell RefWorks what kind of database you are using before you can import your citations points to the way RefWorks is designed for database vendors as opposed to users.
Having to tell RefWorks that you are using the database family “Ovid” and then having to pick “PsychInfo” after selecting Ovid is sort of crazy.

RefWorks does work very well with Cambridge Scientific Abstracts databases, where you just select your citations and you can click on a “save to refworks” button and your citations will be automatically imported. Hopefully more database vendors can add this direct export to RefWorks option. It would certainly make using it much easier.