I’m a big Zotero fan.  Anyone who has access to the Firefox web browser and needs or wants to keep track of bibliographies, websites, and other material used for research should use it instead of the bloated, overly expensive, difficult to use commercial citation managers such as Reference Manager, RefWorks, ProCite, and the like.  Zotero does everything you need and more, and does it better than the competition.  Did I mention it’s free?!

Today in the Chronicle of Higher Education there is an article (it’s freely available, you don’t need a subscription to access it) about a proposal made by the creators of Zotero to put it on steroids.  Put simply, they intend to make Zotero the tool of choice for researchers, scientists, professors, and others to load their research works into a shared database hosted by the Internet Archive.  The article notes the general failure (oh wait, I mean, lack of success) that libraries have had with doing this on an institution-by-institution basis using tools such as DSpace.  There is a scathing review about so-called institutional repositories and their use by libraries by one of the people I’d deem to be a foremost expert on utilizing DSpace, Dorothea Salo. It is well worth reading.

Anyway, I think this whole idea — actually, it’s more than that because the Mellon Foundation just dished out hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it a reality — has many beneficial implications and I hope Dan Cohen and his team at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University have all the success they hope for with it.  (Thanks to Wally Grotophorst for the mention.)