Public service announcement of the day

I realize I haven’t posted in a while…and I have no excuse (it’s spring break right now, for crying out loud!). But this isn’t going to be much of a post either. Rather, its sole function is to point you to this awesome Firefox plugin — Zotero. What is Zotero? Zotero is an online/offline bibliography manager (think: free Endnotes. Only it’s much better than Endnotes. And did I mention that it’s free?). From what I’ve seen thus far, it’s just awesome. And you can work with it offline, too which is a definite perk. It also allows you to use tags for your entries so that you can do quick searches (very handy for dissertating, if you ask me. (Isn’t ‘dissertating’ a nice word? Just rolls off the tongue…)). One of the best things? If you see a book or article or other citation online that you’d like to include in your database, you can basically just click on a little icon in the address bar (the icon looks like a book) and it will save the reference for you in Zotero…so you don’t have to manually insert all of the information. (Woot!) So if you don’t have Endnotes yet, or hate Endnotes, or don’t have any sort of bibliography manager thing, go get Zotero.

That’s it. All I wanted to say. I’ve got a couple of papers on eristic that I want to read before the day is out. And I have to go torture take the cat to the vet later, so I should get reading.

UPDATE: OK – I have to keep adding to the raves about Zotero. I’m probably like 95% of people who use the internet for scholarship these days in that I’ve got tons of papers downloaded to my computer. I try to organize them in reasonable ways, but it gets difficult to find papers sometimes. With Zotero, you can link to the file on your computer so that when you bring up the reference on the Zotero interface, you can just click on the link to the paper and open the document. (I can envision that this attachment option would also be useful if you’ve taken notes on the paper/book and/or have reviews or replies to the work and so could link to the file with the notes/reviews so that, if you ever need to reference them, they’re readily findable.) If that doesn’t rock your world then I don’t know what would.