Scott McLemee endorses Zotero
Zotero is free, open-source software that runs as a FireFox plugin. It does much of the work of bibliographic software like Endnote, but it's specifically for online research.
I have used it a little I am not sure I like it. I like the idea of it. But I need to use it more to get a sense of whether it will really serve me well in the long run.
What I love about Endnote is that it works with MS Word (which I hate) to embed formatted citations in my work. I don't think Zotero would let me do that. But over at my Google blog, someone mentioned that you can use Zotero with Google Docs to simulate footnotes.
Over at Inside Higher Ed Scott McLemee looks at how it works.
Mark of Zotero
By Scott McLemee
Zotero is a tool for storing, retrieving, organizing, and annotating digital documents. It has been available for not quite a year. I started using it about six weeks ago, and am still learning some of the fine points, but feel sufficient enthusiasm about Zotero to recommend it to anyone doing research online. If very much of your work involves material from JSTOR, for example – or if you find it necessary to collect bibliographical references, or to locate Web-based publications that you expect to cite in your own work — then Zotero is worth knowing how to use. (You can install it on your computer for free; more on that in due course.)
Intellectual Affairs
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Now, my highest qualification for testing a digital tool is, perhaps, that I have no qualifications for testing a digital tool. That is not as paradoxical as it sounds. The limits of my technological competence are very quickly reached. My command of the laptop computer consists primarily of the ability to (1) turn it on and (2) type stuff. This condition entails certain disadvantages (the mockery of nieces and nephews, for example) but it makes for a pretty good guinea pig.
And in that respect, I can report that the folks at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media have done an exemplary job in designing Zotero. A relatively clueless person can learn to use it without exhaustive effort.
Still, it seems as if institutions that do not currently do so might want to offer tutorials on Zotero for faculty and students who may lack whatever gene makes for an intuitive grasp of software. Academic librarians are probably the best people to offer instruction. Aside from being digitally savvy, they may be the people at a university in the best position to appreciate the range of uses to which Zotero can be put. ...
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