Since many of you have asked for it (and because we thought it was a good idea anyway), we’ve increased our efforts in developing support and documentation materials for Mendeley. For example, some users (especially librarians) wanted to give a presentation about Mendeley at their institution, or asked for some written documentation about how to use Mendeley.
Currently, we are working on both a new support section and on some updated about pages. Today however, as a little appetizer, we proudly present our new and fresh teaching materials! You can use them to learn more about Mendeley’s features, or you can use them to spread the word about Mendeley by giving a presentation at your institution or department/lab by simply forwarding the materials to your colleagues, other researchers, and students.
- Getting Started Guide: The Getting Started Guide shows you how to use Mendeley’s basic features. It is also bundled together with each Mendeley Desktop installation. You can download the document here (size: 1 MB).
- Teaching Presentation: You can spread the word about Mendeley at your institution using our Teaching Presentation (feel free to adapt the presentation to your needs). It shows both Mendeley’s vision and how to use the features of Mendeley Desktop and Web. Get the Adobe PDF (size: 4 MB) or the Powerpoint PPT (size: 22 MB) file.
- Mendeley Fact Sheet: For a quick overview of Mendeley’s features, have a look at our Fact Sheet. On just two pages, it describes what Mendeley is, and it’s easy to forward. You can download the Fact Sheet here (size: 2 MB).
- Mendeley Poster: Finally, didn’t you dream of having a Mendeley poster next to your Albert Einstein one? Here it is, put it on your wall or the notice board of your university. Enjoy it here (A4, size: 0.5 MB) or download the larger one (A3, size: 1 MB).
Soon, you’ll also be able to download these teaching materials from our updated web pages. A big thank you to Aladin, one of our great Mendeley interns, and Ricardo, one of our community liaisons!
Mendeley Blog 
If you want to get any traction in Australia, bear in mind that universities here are highly autocratic and .. you know what that ends up meaning: exercises in ‘assessing software’ by committees are formalities, with the fat old white guys already having decided what they want.
In short, for the Antipodes at least (and I imagine it’ll be the same in many places) you’ll need a substantial wine’n’dine budget to get Mendeley promoted by the universities.
I agree – it’s probably similar in many other places. Still, we already had many supportive comments from librarians, asking for more information, and that’s the background of this post. So far, we’ve mostly knocked on open doors, giving many presentations, and the library science guild is very open minded and interested in what we do.
And unfortunately, it’s hard to make a wine’n’dine budget available for download.