Zotero document database tool

[trippwj]

I have been using Collectorz (see topic in this forum) for a few years now to track and manage my collection of books (which is extensive).  I have found it less practical, however, to manage my large and ever expanding collection of downloaded journal articles, old books in PDF and so on. 

 

I have tried a couple of different programs, some of which were much more intuitive and easy to use than others, and found that Zotero is an extremely easy to learn, flexible, and quick way to organize and track my collection.

 

https://www.zotero.org/

 

Zotero utomatically senses content in your web browser, allowing you to add it to your personal library with a single click. Whether you're searching for journal article from JSTOR, a news story from the New York Times, or a book from your university library catalog, Zotero has you covered with support for thousands of sites.  It also will add information from Google Books, archive.org and many more.  When available, it will automatically download the file as an attachment to the entry.  You can also download the file to your computer and then link it to the entry in Zotero. You can add PDFs, images, audio and video files, snapshots of web pages, and really anything else. Zotero automatically indexes the full-text content of your library, enabling you to find exactly what you're looking for with just a few keystrokes.

 

Whether you need to create footnotes, endnotes, in-text citations, or bibliographies, Zotero will do all the dirty work for you, leaving you free to focus on your writing. Create citations in Word and OpenOffice without ever leaving your word processor and add references to an email, a Google Doc, or some other editor simply by dragging one or more references out of Zotero.  There are well over 200 specific citation formats available through their website that can be added to your program.

 

The program can be downloaded as a stand-alone version on your computer (which I use) or as a Firefox (Mozilla) add-on.

 

Zotero is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and was initially funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

 

 

 

 

 

[flying_dutchman2]

I use something called ReadCube. Great for research on any topic. Use it for work when I have a difficult problem to solve and use it on naval history as well.

Marc