My short-lived Zotero experience
Thing 19 for the 23 Things for Professional Developmentis another reflection week. This time the emphasis is on integrating the tools that we have been playing with. I thought I should confess that my Firefox / Zotero experiment (cpd23. Thing 14: Zotero / Mendeley / citeulike) was short-lived. Firefox didn’t work smoothly with my bookmarks or with Evernote and Zotero didn’t become the constantly referenced list of books I had hoped it would be for me. And then, a week or so ago, Firefox started crashing on me.
I used the crashing as an excuse to go back to Google Chrome and realized that I was managing things much more quickly because the bookmarks are more intuitive for me and because the little elephant web clipper for Evernote is just really slick in its operation with this browser.
Evernote has not turned into the black box that most things (like Zotero) do for me. I’m in it every day for a couple of different logging activities. It also helps that at least most Sundays, I skim through all but the archived notes so that I remember the sort of things that I put in Evernote.
So, I’m going to start clipping book recommendations into Evernote and see if that will help me keep track of books I want to read and who posted about them.
What tools do you use for keeping track of books you want to read? And other things in life?
note that Zotero also comes with a (stable beta) standalone version with a Chrome connector:
http://www.zotero.org/support/3.0#zotero_standalone
Fair enough, but you have to consider that Zotero is much more than just a “bookmark saver”; actually, it’s not very good at that. Zotero is a bibliographic citation manager, it’s for collecting citations and editing them in a paper according to those wickedly-complex citation styles that journals require. If you use it just for bookmarks you should really check CiteUlike, it’s pretty neat.
Btw, you should do something about those Firefox crashes, they are not normal…! And in the end, yes: the fact that Zotero is just a Firefox plugin and cannot be use with other browsers really sucks. But now they are changing it, as the previous comment says.