Yes, call us fickle and lacking in loyalty when it comes to note-taking and research organization tools.  Does anyone else remember the 5×8 cards with holes punched on all four perimeters?  You entered “tags” or keywords by clipping out the outer edge of the hole, and when you needed to find a particular note card, a knitting needle-sized wire was inserted into the whole pack.  Shake the cards and the desired note fell out.  Sometimes.

Since going digital 25 years ago, we've tried dozens of tools to try and bring some order to what we've turned up online and need to save.  Most were fine innovations and advances at the time, but there was often something that didn't quite meet all of our needs or desires.  That still might be true, but a new entry in the research management derby (thanks to the cite from The Scout Report quoted below) delivers up an impressive new tool.

Zotero is a Firefox extension with rich, intuitive tools that are flexible enough to support the way YOU want/need to work.  This is only version 1.0, but I think I have a new best friend.

Zotero

http://www.zotero.org/

“It can be hard to keep Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolfe straight at times, and if you are working on an academic paper that incorporates both of these august characters, you probably want to keep those research sources in good order. Thanks to Zotero, it is very easy to do just that. Zotero is a Firefox extension that helps users collect, manage, and cite their research sources. Zotero can automatically capture citation information from web pages, store PDF files, and also export these citations with relatively ease. This very helpful extension is compatible with computers running Firefox 2.0.” [KMG]