Zotero is freakin' awesome!

I've only been out of grad school eight years, but it's astonishing how technology has changed everything about research just in that time.  It's a whole new geeky world out there, baby. 

I am trying to write an encyclopedia article on Religion and Literature in American history.  In case you didn't hear the note of panic in my e-voice, that's all of religion, and all of literature, and all of American history.  Due date: August 15.  Are we having fun yet?

Enter Zotero, a.k.a. The Little Research Engine That Could.  This tool is amazing!  Basically, the idea behind Zotero is that scholars like me who have infinite numbers of yellow post-its stuck in their books but can't quite locate the one they need when they need it can have everything at their fingertips online.  Zotero catalogs all of your research by capturing web pages, bibliographic info, random notes, html tags, whatever, all in one place.  It's all searchable and exportable when the time comes for you to actually stop your research to write.  It's compatible with Google Scholar (which I admit I'd never even heard of until last week), Amazon, the New York Times, Lexis Nexis, etc., with more sites coming into the fold all the time.  You put Zotero right into your Firefox web browser and go to town.  (It's not compatible with Internet Explorer -- take that, Bill Gates.)

At the very least, Zotero makes it so that I will never have to type in another bibliography -- Zotero captures all that info automatically online and puts it into whatever format I want -- and that I can keep all my notes in a single place rather than scattered in random Word files (at best) or the aforementioned post-it notes (at worst). 

Thanks to Tona Hangen for introducing me to this fancy-pants tool!

Comments

[JanaRemy]

Jana:
I'm a big zotero fan, too! I've got a youtube vid linked on my history blog that gives a great overview of how the program works: http://makinghistorypodcast.com/2008/01/29/technological-tools-for-historians/

[Tona]

Glad you're liking it - I am amazed at everything it does and I love that it's open source and free. My favorite things are being able to make iPod-like collections which can contain things that were filed under other collections, and then being able to text-search anything in the entry so if I can only remember one thing about it I can come up with it easily. I recently converted all my paper files to Zotero entries so at least now I can look up where I filed the paper copy! I've become an indadvertent groupie of those geniuses at the Center for History & New Media at George Mason.