Software Review: Zotero

[Cliff N. Hansen]

I love it when you find new tools that help you organize the way you work already. Dennis Stoval introduced me to a plug-in for FireFox called Zotero (seen at left in a screen-capture). Zotero is a tool to assist organizing your research. It integrates itself seamlessly into FireFox by adding a little caption in the bottom of your status bar and (for some sites) a button up in your address bar where the RSS feed links sometimes show up. What it does is allow you to capture websites, books from Amazon, news pages etcetera and keep track of the information you find allowing both for offline browsing of your research and quick citations in a handful of formats (including Chicago Style).

I started using Zotero somewhat hesitantly since I never quite understood its full purpose. I found myself quickly becoming reliant on it for my research. Basically I can browse the internet and library resources in the way I normally would and whenever I stumble across any information that I think I might use will come in handy I can capture the website via Firefox. Now I have the opportunity to sort/search/organize all this information weeding through what's useful and what's not for the sake of my novel, also allowing me to be continuously building a big bibliography. It's nice because it avoids the pitfalls of learning some snippet of information and then later forgetting where you learned it from. The downfall is that since files are saved locally I can't access my Zotero collection if I'm on another computer such as in a library or at work. It has an export feature which is important for backup purposes, but since you need to install the Zotero plugin in Firefox, you won't be able to use it anywhere that won't allow you to install new programs (pretty much anywhere but on your computer). They are in the process of creating a new version in which they promise "server-side tools", so I think they might already be working on this.

For the purposes of my novel I am combining Zotero with the flowcharting abilities of FreeMind for some amazing organizational effects. I definitely recommend that you check this out!