How Did I Ever Manage without This?

Zotero: The Bibliographic Lifesaver

One of the biggest benefits of taking RS101OL was a small little piece of advice that was given to us during one of the video lectures: that was about using bibliographic software.  I wasn't really up to learning how to use a new software tool this semester but I decided to give Zotero a try.  After using it for a couple of days I honestly had to ask myself, "How did I ever manage without this?"  Zotero was not only easy to use, for me it was a bibliographic lifesaver.

Full Disclosure

There are a number of programs available to help organize your sources that integrate with your word processing software to make creating footnotes and a bibliography much easier.  I didn't put a whole lot of thought into choosing Zotero, in fact, it was a pretty easy decision for me.  I was really attracted to Zotero's price tag, or rather it's freeness.  Despite being free, I found it to be more than capable to handle the kind of sourcing I was doing.  In time, perhaps I might consider a more fully featured software program, but to be honest, I can't think of too much more I'd want to do that I can't already do with Zotero.

Its Simplicity is Misleading

Installation was a breeze and I had Zotero up in running in no time.  Being the stereotypical guy that I am, I passed on looking at any documentation to actually learn how to use the software and just dove right in.  What is immediately striking about Zotero when you first run it is how simple it really is.  I mean it's really Spartan in terms of what you see when you run the program.  Despite having an initial feeling that this was going to be just too vanilla for my needs, I gave it a whirl.  Turns out, Zotero's simplicity is just that - simple; but its simplicity is not indicative of its functionality.  It's still flexible enough to handle even the toughest kinds of citations you'll need to develop.

Some Assembly Required

After quickly falling in love with the ease of setting up sources in the database, I decided to go ahead and install the plugins for Microsoft Word 2013.  Well, this didn't work for me out of the box and I had to do a little research to finally get the plugin to show up on my toolbar.  What was nice is that Zotero runs a support forum and after a few minutes I found the information that I needed and then I was all set up with Word.  Overall, it was just a hiccup in my overall experience.

Cool Features

There are a number of features that I've come to rely on heavily when it comes to managing my bibliographic work which I immediately found useful in my writing for DTS which I'll note below.

1. Automatically format footnotes, endnotes, and bibliography in Turabian format.  DTS uses the Turabian format and I didn't have any issues at all in having all my sources for my work show up in the proper format.
2. Automatically import sources using ISBN numbers.  Rather than entering all the information manually, Zotero allows you to specify an ISBN number and it then downloads the appropriate information for your source.  There are a couple of gotchas though:
1. You'll probably have to reformat some of the information that it retrieves.  This is not really a problem as all the right information is present, but you may have to fiddle with the title capitalization, the publisher location, and other minor data points.  
2. I did find one case where the downloaded information was totally incorrect.  Just keep in mind that Zotero doesn't manage that information and you'll need to carefully double check all the data to make sure it's what you expect it to be.
3. You can create collections of materials that make managing your projects very easy.  Rather than having a huge master list of sources that you need to filter through everytime you cite a source, you can drag sources into a collection so when you are citing many sources, you have a pre-filtered list to choose from.  Very handy! 
4. Integration with MS Word was very easy to use once I got it set up.  You just click the toolbar to add a citation, select the format, and voila!  Once you're all finished citing your work, you just click to add a bibliography and you're all done.

Overall Impression

Zotero is free and a breeze to get comfortable to use.  I saved myself hours and hours of time this semester as almost all of my papers for ST101OL required the use of the Turabian formatted sources.  I honestly don't know how I made it to this point in my academic career without using this kind of tool.  I couldn't be happier with Zotero, but in general, I've come to believe that having some kind of integrated software program for bibliography management is essential when writing papers for my DTS courses.  Do it, you won't regret it.