I had a meeting with a professor friend of mine about a month ago and he asked me if I was using zotero. He's working on a book and swears by it for managing his on-line research. It wasn't the first time that anyone told me about zotero, in fact, I originally heard about it from someone at the Mellon Foundation which partially funded its development. After such high praise from the professor, I decided to download it myself. I've been living with it and loving it for about a month now. Why didn't I start using it two years ago?
zotero is a Firefox plug-in, so it works everywhere Firefox works. It fits into the same space as Refworks and EndNote, although it is considerably less expensive (free!). Some of the recent literature I've read about it, including this year's win at Northwestern University's CiteFest, indicate that zotero is every bit as good as commercial products. I've been using it to collect and organize articles, Web pages, book chapters, books, and journal articles. It works a bit like del.icio.us or other social bookmarking sites, but it makes a distinction between different types of on-line resources (e.g. Web pages vs. book sections vs. books, etc.).
I'm moderating a faculty panel at the TLT Symposium on Saturday an I've built a zotero folder for each of the faculty members I'm introducing. In each folder, I have links to their blogs, class pages, syllabi, and various rich media generated by them and their students along with notes and tags for each resource. Speaking of the TLT Symposium, there's a session on EndNote, Refworks, and zotero in the morning at the TLT Symposium given by Ellysa Cahoy and Dawn Amsberry.
I'm still working on different ways to sync zotero content with "the network" or all my machines. I'll follow when I learn more. For now I'm going to keep using it.
Jim,
This is interesting. I had looked at Zotero a while back. I think I first heard of it as part of "Firefox Campus Edition".
I've been using CiteULike for the last few months. The main drawback to EndNote or RefWorks to me is simply the cost. But a big reason for me choosing CiteULike was the Web-availability. Like you, I live on multiple machines and didn't want to have to rely on synchronizing. Plus, there's a bit of a del.icio.us / social networking aspect to it. The big drawback is the lack of integration with word processing software. (There is BibTeX export though!)
I see that Zotero has instructions for "portable solutions". I might have to re-examine it. I'm working on a collaborative research project and one of the things we need to figure out yet is how to manage a shared bibliography. I wonder if we could keep the "zotero portable" in our version control system?
Have you checked-out Connotea? It's from the publishers of Nature. I have an account there, too. I have my opinion about this service. I'd be curious to hear some others.