Yesterday, version 1.0 of Zotero was released. Since its initial release last year, Zotero has become my most important research tool. It’s a bibliographic management tool, but it’s also much more than that.
Zotero is a Firefox 2 plugin, so it works anywhere that Firefox does (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc). It provides a way to keep all your document-based research organized, but it can also automatically grab bibliographic data (and more) off the web. Zotero can automatically take snapshots of web pages, which are then available for annotation and highlighting within the browser window.
Zotero 1.0 can interface with OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word to provide citation management (I’m not personally sure how well this works yet). Future upgrades (handled automatically through Firefox’s extension manager) will add collaborative features and online backups. These features have the potential to change the way humanities scholars do research.
Zotero is free, both as in beer and as in speech. There is no charge to download this program, and the source code is available, if that’s your thing.
Importantly, Zotero has a very usable and intuitive interface. It’s kind of like iTunes for bibliographic data.
If you’re an academic who is facing the challenge of managing your sources, check out Zotero.
10 December 2007 at 1:12 pm
James,
We’ve talked a little bit about this before, but still I’ll go ahead and ask: can you recommend a link resolver for a university library that has good South Asia resources and whose citations import into Zotero with diacritics intact?
14 December 2007 at 3:14 am
Hi Luke,
I use the Columbia resolver.
http://e-link.cul.columbia.edu:9003/culink
If I remember correctly, diacritics come through fine, which is a little odd since they don’t look right on CLIO itself.
Wouldn’t it be best for you to use the Emory resolver, though? The big help of a resolver is that it helps find full-text of articles and that sort of thing. You can still pull records out of any compatible catalog without selecting a particular resolver.