Referencing made easy!

Oh my word - I fear I'm a little bit in love with Zotero! I haven't had much experience of referencing software in the past. I had a play with Endnote towards the end of uni, but as I had already made reference notes for my dissertation by the time I'd discovered it, I never did more than having a quick look and think 'what a good idea' and then promptly went off and graduated and left the world of essay writing behind me.

I do, though, remember the sometimes feverishly last minute referencing sessions (it always seemed to take longer than I thought it would) at essay deadline time - something I hope not to repeat at library school. So basically, Zotero to the rescue! I did have to download Firefox specifically so I could run Zotero which is frustrating - as many people have pointed out, plug-ins for other browsers would be handy. The fact that I can see immediate applications for Zotero in my own studies suggests it could be useful for other students and therefore is useful for librarians to be aware of when supporting students.

Browsing and then saving references on the one screen is brilliant - no need to flick from window to window. Obviously it means you have to have Zotero installed on the computer you are using. This is the only really annoying feature of Zotero - you can't log into the website and then manually add a reference to your list. I can see this being frustrating if working from a computer elsewhere - you have to make notes of the reference to add to Zotero later. Delicious could be used for links in the meantime though.

Transferring references to Word works well, although you do have to check the referencing, but simply copying the references still saves so much time in comparison with entering them manually. I also looked at Mendeley in comparison to Zotero and in many ways it works in similar ways although trying to link it to Word created a few problems. It felt a lot less straightforward than Zotero because of this, Zotero was download and go, which is all part of the reason I'm slightly in love!