Research Tips: Zotero - Wow!

Peter Brantley recently sent an announcement through the DLF-ANNOUNCE list saying that Zotero and the Internet Archive have formed a partnership to encourage online storage of scholarly materials into a "Zotero Commons" and to allow for scholarly collaboration, among other things. Read more here.

Zotero has been on my "trythis" list for some time now, so I decided to go ahead and try it out. Wow! I wish I would have had something like this during college.

As I am searching in my library catalog, many of the library databases, and on the internet, I can save articles, books, and sites in Zotero by simply clicking a document icon that appears in the URL field of my browser window. Then, to view, organize, and tag my saved items, I click the "Zotero" icon that appears in my browser's status bar, which produces an extra window pane at the bottom of the browser window. Then, when I have all my articles, books, websites, etc. organized, I can export them to create a bibliography in a quite a few citation styles and file formats.

Oh, yeah, and it's FREE!

You can download Zotero here and view two brief tutorials here to see an overview and a demonstration.

I've now been pondering ways I can use this, aside from the intended purpose of scholarly research.

1) Database presentations - When I present on particular databases, I often end up bookmarking vendors sites with information, title lists, training materials, and other items related to that database, so now I could keep track of all that in one labeled Zotero folder instead of my spreadsheets and bookmarks.

2) Reading lists - Since I can bookmark items from Amazon and WorldCat.org (and some databases, too), I could start building reading lists that could easily be exported as bibliographies to share with anyone.

3) Genealogy research - You can save images and files as attachments when you save a record. I haven't tested this with some of the genealogy databases yet, but it might help to keep track of all the family records and local histories.

Hmmm...I know there could be quite a few more creative uses. If you can think of anything, please share your ideas!