The Future of Research

Zotero

Posted Sunday, October 14, 2007 by Charlie Trimm

A friend of mine recently told me about a new add-on for firefox called zotero. It is simply an amazingly helpful add-on! It has two primary functions. One, which I have not used much yet, is to make a bibliography. You can import book, articles, lectures, web pages or whatever you want into the program, and then it will give you a bibliography in whatever format you want. I think that this will have problems for me when I try it, but at least it gives a good start. It doesn't even have SBL yet, which is the required formate here at Wheaton. But the other function is very helpful. After you upload items, you can arrange them in various categories and you can add notes to them. That way, as you are doing research, you can add notes about the book and then mark the notes according to topic. You can also attack various items to each entry, such as snapshots of web pages, pdf files, and any other type of file you want. Items can be uploaded from places like Amazon, ATLA, and worldcat, or you can just type in the correct info yourself. The files are stored in the firefox directory and can be backed up very easily, as well as transferred to other computers if you would like using a flash drive. Overall, this is a very helpful program! If you are doing any kind of study at all, I would recommend using this program.