Tackled Zotero today. I had a bit of trouble with it at first. I couldn’t download it in class because it is not yet available for the iPad. Somewhat understandable, I suppose. Back home, I first attempted to download it on Chrome, which is what I usually use. It did give me the little icon to download a page, but when I clicked that it just thought and thought and then said it couldn’t download it. And I could not figure out to access anything once I did get it downloaded. The reviews seem to indicate that problems running Zotero on Chrome are pretty common. So I jumped over to Firefox and tried it out there. It worked like a dream. Simple to download, super easy to use, highly useful. I added two sources I had already identified and made notes about in a GoogleDoc (my semi-oldschool version of high tech source organization) and magically I had the whole documents, with biblio info and a nice little space for taking notes and tagging things. The tags will be especially useful as I work through further research.
Having to operate within Firefox is a minor inconvenience, just given the way my family shares this computer, but I think adapting to a new browser, or even flopping between the two, might be worth it. I am excited to play with the tool a bit more and plan to use it for a research project I am conducting in another class as well–the ability to store things in multiple collections is simple and handy as well.
Overall, I approve. I wish it would have worked in Chrome, but inside of Firefox it is a great tool!
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