EricHoefler.com

I was a huge fan of Zotero even when it was a local-only extension.¹ Now that it will sync across computers and allow online access to your library (with the 1.5 beta), it’s definitely at the top of my list of research tools. The blog post announcing this update is here.

For anyone wondering, I think Zotero is a nice complement to Delicious, not a competitor. I use Delicious to collect all of my bookmarks, for various purposes. Zotero instead competes with services like Diigo, because both allow you to make a copy of the content and add notes and annotations.

While Diigo trumps Zotero in its social aspects,² Zotero definitely wins as a serious research tool. First of all, with Zotero, the pages you save and notes you make are stored on your computer and then synced online, instead of being held exclusively online as with Diigo, which means that even if Zotero disappears down the road, you’ll still have your content. This also means that you can use Zotero offline, which makes it a great tool when your research incorporates old-fashioned things like books and newspapers! Zotero also works with Word and OpenOffice.org to add citations and bibliographies in a huge variety of formats.

1. Only part of this devotion has to do with the fact that it was developed at my grad school, GMU. The other part is that it’s just a great tool. [back]
2. For now, at least. It will be interesting to see how Zotero develops its web application [back]