Sunday 15 August 2010

Zero to Zot-hero

Okay, I think we can safely say that puns are officially Not My Thing™. Anyway, I'd never heard of Zotero before, but the cam23 description of it had me drooling. A way to keep all my citations together? One click and it's saved for whenever I need it? Brilliant.

Bit of a brain meltdown - I'm doing this at home with a newly-built computer (from old parts), and frowned mightily when I couldn't read the .pdfs. Hadn't automatically installed Adobe Reader, duhhhh. But now that's done, and I can see how other people have used this little gizmo. I have to say, it looks very appealing. I'm not so keen on the way it says:

Intuitive Interface
Zotero's iTunes-like interface allows you to quickly organize your research sources
 But that's mainly because I don't like iTunes, and don't find its interface intuitive. So, I guess I'd need a while to get to grips with how it looks if I did use it, but I think it's almost certainly worth it. I have quite a few assignments to do for my degree, and I think I'll have a go at using Zotero for the first one at least, to see how it goes. It will almost certainly be better than what I currently do when pulling research together, which is have an email sitting in my draft folder, and every time I find a new source, or quote, or link, or anything useful, I add to it. Mind you, the advantage of that is that it's available anywhere, doesn't require downloading/installing anything, and is backed up to at least 3 different locations!, but then I still have to rewrite the citations into Harvard APA, which was a great pain until I discovered this.

In conclusion, I very much like the sound of it. It's got obvious practical applications, and while Chrome still fails to set my world on fire, it's not a problem that it's only available on Firefox. I think I'd need to try it out further by actually doing some research - but that will have to wait until after I've finished the other Things!

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