A peek at Zotero
“So I noticed that Dan Cohen has a GMU email address,” a librarian friend of mine IMed me last week. “Know anything about Zotero?”
If you ask me, Zotero is the measure of how badly EndNote and RefWorks have failed the market. I’ve tried to use RefWorks. It’s a disaster. I tried to use EndNote lo these many years ago, and couldn’t get it so much as running.
By serendipity I had a chance to sit in on a Zotero demo five or six weeks ago. By the time Dan was done showing it off, my only question was “When can I have this, please?”
It’s not perfect. But it’s leaps and bounds better than RefWorks, I’ll tell you that. And it’s better than CiteULike, which I also tried to use and gave up on because entering citations was such a chore. And for its purpose, it’s also better than del.icio.us, which I use for some stuff I get via library databases for lack of a better way to keep track of them. (Zotero does tagging, and Zotero does storage. The thing is, Zotero does quite a bit more than that. del.icio.us doesn’t.)
For once, the hype isn’t overhyped. Zotero is a genuinely cool tool, built by a group of wicked-smart, frighteningly energetic people. Speaking of which, they’re hiring. I recommend them to job-seekers without hesitation.