I am beside myself with joy over the discovery of Zotero, the free bibliographic software that is an add-on to the Mozilla Firefox internet browser. Someone mentioned it to me at the SASS conference and it piqued my curiosity. I just checked it out this afternoon and it has blown me away. I have known about Endnote for a few years, but never felt it was worth investigating, even though some early-adapter colleagues raved. I don't know enough to compare the two, having never looked at Endnote, but Zotero does so much more than I ever imagined that I don't see myself bothering to investigate whether Endnote actually does even more.
With the add-on installed, you can instantaneously add any bibliographic citation from, say, an online library catalog to your own personal library database with the click of one discrete icon. You can sync it with a free zotero.org account so that you can access your database from any computer. You can create and import bibliographies into, say, a Microsoft Word document. You can format the bibliography in any one of several citation styles (MLA, Chicago, Harvard, to mention the one I most frequently use). You can add notes to entries. It is just so freaking cool that I can hardly stand it. I'm so glad I looked into this now, at the beginning of my new book project, rather than at the end of the process, especially since this is an unwieldly, interdisciplinary project that will have a gargantuan bibliography.
Okay. Nerd rant over. But really, everyone doing academic work should start using this immediately!
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