I have a confession to make. I really hate downloading any kind of program onto my computer. My laptop is, well, old. I bought it with the money from a scholarship I received at the end of high school. I’ll have had it for four years in the beginning of April. I don’t download any program that I don’t absolutely need onto it, because I am terrified of messing it up. I’ve already had to have it fixed once, because there was a problem with the hard drive. Anyway, suffice it to say that this whole Zotero process was not something I was comfortable with. I had to download and install not only Zotero itself, but Firefox, too? Zotero and I didn’t exactly get our relationship started off on the right foot.
But this morning, I started trying to get the sources for my annotated bibliography loaded onto it. I was really just trying to figure out how many sources I had, because I had been waiting for several articles from Inter-Library Loan. Some had come through; others, not so much. Now, if you watch the introductory video on Zotero’s homepage, they make it look really easy to add sources. Go to the page you want with Firefox, click the little icon on the right side of the address bar, and it’s there. It didn’t work that way for me. It refused to add anything from the library databases, which was where 10 out of 12 of my sources came from. I had to click “New Journal Article” and manually enter all of the information to get each source in the library. Sounds like a pain, right? But now that I’ve done it, I am really liking Zotero. I tagged all of my sources as either “Scholarly” or “Creative/Journalistic,” and now all I have to do is click on one of the tags to see how many sources I have. If you right-click on the item once it is in the library, you can attach the full-text of the article, whether it is a PDF or a Word document. How awesome is that? No more trying to hunt the same sources down in the academic databases over and over again (because even if you copy down the “permanent” link to the article, you have to be logged in first or it won’t work, so usually I have to search for the article once again after I find it). I haven’t added any annotations yet, but it can’t be any more difficult to add a note than it is to add a tag, right? I made a folder specifically for my Core II research, because I’ve decided to use Zotero for all my research work now. I’ve got a psychology paper coming up, and it will be so much easier to find and deal with sources from the database now that I know how to use Zotero. I wish I didn’t have to add everything manually, but it’s definitely worth it.
Third Friday tonight…another update later.
