Zotero, a research tool

As I wanted to build a kind of library of the books I have read so far I began to research in the internet for some tools.

At first I took a look at social cataloging websites such as the libraryThing and shelfari. Those web apps allow you to collect all books you have read and want to read and attach reviews and ratings to them. Also you can invite your friends to share your collection with them and to give and receive recommendations.

Those web apps are nice, but somehow I was not really satisfied. After a while I stumbeled over this comparison on wikipedia about reference management software. I realised that I was looking for something called a "Reference Management" :) And after trying some Links in the comparsion I ended up at Zotero.org - which might be exactly what I was looking for.

It is a Firefox Plugin which allows you to collect any type of references: Books, Articles, Websites, Blog Posts, etc. . For all web-pages you can either just post a link, or make a local copy. When you opt for the seconds option, you also can annotate the webpage with personal comments directly in the text and also highlight certain passages, just as if you were working with a PDF.

For Articles and Books Zotero can extract the biblographic information from a lot of webpages, eg. Amazon or Library websites. So, when I find a book on the library catalogue of Bremen I can add it with one click to my digital book collection. And once it is in there I also can attach notes, tags and related-items to it. Thats what makes online research so much easier!

Just as importing references, exporting is also very easy. OpenOffice, Word and Google Docs are supported to export you references to.

At the moment the whole thing is a client application, so its like the local bookmarks you save on a particular computer. You cannot access your library from another computer and therefor you also cannot share it with other users, to work together on one library. The good news are that the developers are currently working on exactly that feature. With this server functionality Zotero will be even more useful, so i hope it will be available soon.

Find more information at Zotero.org and in particular check their screencasts.