Zotero

"Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself."

It's only week one of my module in Digital Histories and I've already downloaded, Zotero, Firefox (So I can use Zotero), Drop Box, I've started a blog and made a new Twitter account. Getting so carried away I haven't started any prep work for my other modules. Why would I bury my head in a book about the Suez Crisis when I can sit with my laptop and blog and tweet about history.

This blog is dedicated to Zotero, something which I spent the evening downloading and working out how to use, whilst watching Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with my housemates. After some confusion I had a go at adding books to Zotero which was really quite easy. It sits at the bottom of the web browser and can be opened up just by clicking on the icon. To find out how it works I found one of the most important books I am using for my dissertation, Daniel Hallin's, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam. after opening this book up on Google books, I simply clicked on the little icon and the book was saved in a file on Zotero. When I opened up a word document I clicked on the book title which had saved in Zotero at the bottom of the browser and I dragged it into word. Zotero automatically pastes the whole citation as should be used in an essay - Simples.

Daniel C. Hallin, The uncensored war: the media and Vietnam (University of California Press, 1989).

It's a shame I hadn't found this 2 years ago as the process of referencing and creating a bibliography is one that seems to take me longer than actually writing the essay. I'm hoping to use Zotero more, especially in the writing of my dissertation and am looking forward to what else I can find during the course of my Digital Histories module.

Photo: EdTechNet