Add to my list of fantastic software you should be using (Firefox, Dropbox, Adblock, XMarks) another: Zotero. It is an organization tool for your research that exists as a Firefox add-in (I don’t know why it only supports FF). You can bookmarket pages (imagine that!), sort them, tag them. However, you can also store files in with your bookmarks, refile bookmarks in several places, add notes, citations, and annotations. Basically, it is your bookmarks on super steroids. You can back the bookmarks up to their server, and the stored files to your own server, so everthing can be duplicated across machines. (You know how I feel about that!)
I only discovered it a few months ago when looking over my brother’s shoulder. “Wha’s Zotero?” When he explained it to me, I remarked “that seems pretty useless to me. I don’t plan on writing research papers anytime soon.” However, I have found that it is an excellent organization tool for any type of research you do; I just ignore all of the citation stuff.
I have been using it to organize anything with information, particularly as a part of my research. Say that I am programming in python, and I look up different solutions for communicating with excel. There are several packages out there with a number of pages of interest (not all readily discoverable), and documents on the subject. Furthermore, as I learn more about each solution, I will want to record my discoveries for the future so in 2 months I will be able to remind myself the features and limitations of each product, as applied to my problem. This is easy in Zotero; just see the following screenshot.
Example zotero file in the course of python research
Admittedly, I imported earlier research into Zotero in this case, so it’s not the greatest example. However, you can see I made use of tags (the Python filter has more than just those files tagged with excel) Each of my “bookmarks” is actually a little folder (perhaps documents stapled together) in which I can store related items and tag them all as a group. Notes and other files can go in each bookmark, and they can exist in several folders simultaneously.
There are lots of other features I don’t use, but I can’t recommend it more highly if you ever find yourself researching a topic. Old-fashined bookmarks are a lot of work to organize, and you end up just dumping the in a pile most of the time. The structure here is incredibly easy to create and maintain; making use of only a few of the features should make finding things very easy – just hit “add” button, type a couple tags, maybe a note and move on!
