SnapSession – Zotero

As many of you many already know, I’m beginning my doctoral studies in the Educational Communication and Technology program at New York University. The last time I was in an academic classroom as a student was 2003 and many of the technologies we take for granted today were not around. For instance, during my last semester of my masters program there was no Facebook, flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and Google was just a search engine (not even a verb!).

In fact, as a graduate student, I’d never heard of EndNote, perhaps it was around, perhaps not. Now, I know a lot of faculty around here has asked for Endnote and have even purchased it for themselves. Zotero (http://www.zotero.com) may change all of that. Having never used Endnote, I can’t speak to its operation, but those I know who have used Endnote told me I have to check our Zotero. So check out Zotero I did.

The people who recommended Zotero to me told me they stopped using Endnote once they found Zotero and can’t think of a reason to go back. In fact, they can think of several reasons not it.

According to their web page,“Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.”

Ok – so what does this mean right away? First off, it means you have to use Firefox. What this also means is that you can be a Mac, Windows, or Linux user, as long as you use Firefox. It also means that it doesn’t matter if you work on a PC in the office and a Mac in the studio, if you have a Zotero account, its cross platform.

Basically, when Zotero sees that you are looking at content that is academic, it will, at the click of a button, import all the necessary information for the citation. If you want it to import something, you can still indicate that and fill in any information that Zotero might have missed.

Once something is stored within Zotero, it become searchable. Entires can be personalize, with your own notes, or with tags, which are all searchable. You can even attached screen shots or other attachments, like a PDF, which are ALSO searchable.

Now, here is what I think make Zotero better than Endnote – Zotero will follow you where ever you have access to the Internet. Lets say you take your computer to the library and you are working from there, you have Zotero. How about at the Starbucks, yup – you’ve got Zotero. How about if you go to the library ans use one of THEIR computers? Well, you can sign into the Zotero web page and access anything you’ve stored in “my library” in your account.

Here is the list of things Zotero does, according to their web site:

* Automatically capture citations
* Remotely back up and sync your library
* Store PDFs, images, and web pages
* Cite from within Word and OpenOffice
* Take rich-text notes in any language
* Wide variety of import/export options
* Free, open source, and extensible
* Collaborate with group libraries
* Organize with collections and tags
* Access your library from anywhere
* Automatically grab metadata for PDFs
* Use thousands of bibliographic styles
* Instantly search your PDFs and notes
* Advanced search and data mining tools
* Interface available in over 30 languages

No more needing to remember how to format something (although it is still important to check to be sure it is correct). I was “brought up” in MLA, but now have to switch to APA, and for several of the journals I submit to, they want APA. Now, I no longer need to try and remember what to do on which one.

Do you use Zotero? If so, what do you think? Do you like it better than EndNote? If so, why. If not, why not? If you need to make use of citations, are you willing to try Zotero? If so, would you be willing to come back here and add your thoughts into COMMENTS?