chaos and noise

Today's experiment involves learning to use Zotero. Basically, it's a reference manager that works through Firefox. It lets you save anything that you can view in your web browser. Saved references can be stored in multiple libraries, tagged, searched for, and all the usual features. It also does a few cool things:

- v1.5 (currently in beta) can pull metadata out of PDFs. That's really handy, for those rare PDFs that actually have the stuff.

- You can drag and drop formatted references into Word, Google Docs, and just about anything you might use to write a paper.

- It can save multiple references off a page, with a single action. That's very handy now that the RMIT library is getting some useful subject guides online. On some sites (most library catalogues, major newspaper websites, Amazon.com, etc) it finds bibliographic data automatically.

- It can take a snapshot of any web page. You can treat these essentially like printouts, adding highlighter and sticky notes wherever you need them. As a person who doesn't like printing things (but still thinks in a very visual fashion), I think this is fantastic.

Also, Intel Macs apparently can't use the Acrobat Reader plugin for Firefox 3. That's a big problem for me, as I'm usually downloading and reading 10-20 PDF references a day... my Downloads folder is rapidly filling up with unhelpfully-named files like "86892355a.pdf", and I can't put them into Zotero from Acrobat or Preview.

Luckily, this has been aggravating people with far greater technical skills than I have, so the firefox-mac-pdf plugin now lets me view PDF files in the browser (i.e. the way I used to, before upgrading Firefox...)

EDIT: I've just used the multi-reference tool to export my entire CiteULike library. The page references need a bit of checking, but that was otherwise pretty painless. I'll probably be using Zotero as my main reference manager from now on.