Doing research these days can be… interesting. With the mix of print and online sources, creating a list of all the sources for your current and past projects can be a monumental task. If you only use internet resources (*gasp*), then you can use Delicious, which is a great way to share links with the whole world and tag them with words that you would use to describe them. We even have Delicious accounts here at the library – see uwwedlibrarian (Sue), uwwhistorylibrarian (Ronna) and uwwbizlibraryguy (Kyle).
What do you do when you have a smattering of books, journal articles that you photocopied/scanned, magazine articles from EBSCOhost, and a film in your bibliography? Use Zotero to keep all of those crucial sources in one place. Zotero is a open-source Firefox browser extension that allows you to not only save web pages (it fills in the citation information from the web pages), but also has a feature to add non-electronic sources. Here’s the best part (in my opinion) – it allows you to then create a bibliography with a TON of citation styles, including APA, MLA and many more. All in all, it’s a pretty sweet and FREE way to “research, not re-search”.
Thanks to Maxwell Hsu in the Marketing Department for the link!
Using Microsoft OneNote can be a great place to collect ideas and organize them electronicly. I love how when you copy from a website that the URL is pasted into OneNote automaticly. It’s also useful in putting down random thoughts and being able to move them around easily along with making lists. I recommend OneNote. Check it out.