Zotero Makes Online Research Easy

by Jen Maney
Nov 03, 2008 | Filed in Technology
I've been seeing Zotero mentioned in blogs lately, and wondered what it was all about. After reading about it and watching the Zotero tour, I'm positively intrigued. Zotero is a Firefox extension (sorry, IE users) that allows you to capture, manage and cite online research resources. You can take a snapshot of a Website, make notes about it, tag it and organize Web sites into folders. Zotero captures the citation information from the Website automatically, and when you're ready to cite a source, simply click and drag it from the Zotero interface into your document, perfectly formatted for MLA, APA, Chicago, or whatever style you're using. Can you think of anything that would make research easier? Ok, I can, and Zotero has already thought of it, too. Zotero is working on a way that would allow users to share collections with others, meaning that teams and students working on group research projects could keep all of their notes, sources, and citations in one place. Even without the sharing feature, Zotero is a student or researcher's best friend. Imagine having the information on your research topic all together in one place, organized by you in your own idiosyncratic way, with your own annotations, tags, and attachments. That's what Zotero does for you (that is, if you use Firefox). See Educase's 7 Things You Should Know About Zotero, a quick guide to what Zotero is all about. Jen Maney is the Virtual Library Manager for Pima County Public Library in Tucson, Arizona. The motto of the Virtual Library is, "Designing for uncertainty."

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