http://www.zotero.org
For those of us you use Firefox knows that the add-ons can be priceless additions to our web arsenal. Zotero is one of Firefox’s add-on for the students and researchers out there. It’s an easy yet powerful research tool that can help users gather, organize, and dissect sources of many kinds.
“It's easy to use, lives in your web browser where you do your work, and best of all it's free. Zotero allows you to attach PDFs, notes and images to your citations, organize them into collections for different projects, and create bibliographies using Word or OpenOffice” (Mooney, 2009).
Zotero has easy features like an icon in the URL address area for a quick for collecting a website content. In the lower right corner of the screen is another link area that will open a control panel for the add-on. Within this control panel you can look at the collections of libraries you’ve collected. Inside each library is the list of sites you’ve added, then next to that is the different information for notes, attachments, and tags.
The greatest item about this tool is the ability to see a snapshot of the site you saved and then be able to highlight, and make comments on that page for quick reference. You can save the snapshot with your highlights and comments for future use. Once you have items of interest saved in Zotero, you can create a bibliography by simply dragging selected items from Zotero control panel into a word processor document.
This could be considered a virtual notebook where you can add other file attachments on a particular item in the library. Tags can be created for each saved item to allow for easier search fuctions. Collaborating with others can be done through group library files Zotero.org can be the central location of all your project group's research, communication and organization.
One downfall is that some elements or flash items on pages may not be saved in a snapshot. The sharing the library on multiple computers takes extra step than just logging onto a website since this add-on is downloaded per computer.
Creating a library, bibliography, notes and a compiled amount of information on your research in Zotero is easy and helpful. I find this to be a nice asset in my pocket during my research.
Extra resources:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zotero_moves_into_the_cloud.php
http://liblogs.albany.edu/library20/2007/12/zotero_commons_who_needs_libra.html
http://www.umw.edu/library/zotero/default.php
http://librariansmatter.com/blog/2009/09/15/zotero-and-saving-flickr-images-wowza/
References:
Mooney, E. (2009). Guides. Zotero. Home. Retreived October 16, 2009 from http://guides.main.library.emory.edu/zotero
Video: From YouTube
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This seems like a bookmarking for scholars for the research items to be saved and organized in one's preference. I especially liked the part where it recognizes the content of the PDF files in the website and you can write specific notes in each one.
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