Editorial board thoughts: tools of the trade.

As I was trying to settle on a possible topic for this, my second "Editorial Board Thoughts" piece, I was struggling to find something that I'd like to talk about and that ITAL readers would (I hope) find interesting. I had my "Eureka!" moment one day as I was coming out of a meeting, thinking about a conversation that had taken place around tools.

Now, by tools, I'm referring not to hardware, but to those programs and applications that we can and do use to make our work easier. The meeting was of our institutional repository team, and the tools discussion specifically focused on data cleanup and normalization, citation integration, and the like.

I had just recently returned from a short conference where I had heard mentioned or seen demonstrated a few neat …