1.

The teacher was sitting one day beneath a cherry tree, regarding the birds as they ate its fruit. A student approached the teacher and spoke: “Master,  I am afraid that if I make my research notes open, others will steal my good ideas.”

Instead of answering the student, the master turned and cursed the cherry tree: “You foolish tree! You labor to produce sweet cherries, only to have them stolen by these birds!”

The student was surprised at his teacher’s lack of wisdom, and rose to correct him: “But Master, surely you see that in taking the cherries, the birds also spread the tree’s seeds!”

At that moment the student was enlightened.

2.

Once, a student travelled a long way to speak with the teacher. “Teacher,” the student said, “I have heard your teachings and made all I create freely accessible to all. What is more, I have given it a non-commercial license, to ensure it will not be abused by evil, for-profit companies.”

The teacher responded, “go to the well in the middle of this town, draw out a cup of water, and bring it back here.” The student was surprised at this request, but followed the teacher’s instructions.

When the student returned, the teacher asked, “while you were waiting to draw water, what did you see?”

The student replied, “I saw a farmer getting water to give his livestock, a baker getting water to make bread, and a shopkeeper getting water to wash her windows. All three were prosperous and happy.”

“Very good,” said the teacher. “Now, taste the water. Does it slake your thirst, or not?”  The student tasted the water, and was enlightened.

3.

Once two students were in the midst of an argument as they sat down to eat with the teacher.

One student said, “I believe that true openness means copyleft: we must require anyone using our work to make it it freely available in turn.”  The second student disagreed, saying, “No, openness is about making things easy to share and reuse; we should embrace the least restrictive licenses available.”

Before the argument could continue, the teacher interrupted. “Students,” the teacher asked,  “you see this pot of good food in front of us. Before we eat, I am curious: should it be called soup, or stew?”

“Master, it is stew,” answered the first student.  “No,” retorted the second, “this is too thin; it is soup.”  The master said nothing, so the students continued to argue over this; neither wanted to admit to being wrong in front of the teacher.

After some time, the first student turned and said, “Master, I do not think we can agree on this matter. Soup or stew, it is food, and we are all very hungry; may we at least serve the food and eat, that we may argue with our bellies full?”

Upon saying this, the student was enlightened.

As I’ve written before, I love the free citation manager Zotero.   And the group and sharing features that just dropped as part of v2.0b7, while still a little buggy, are taking the awesomeness up another level.

But one thing about Zotero has always really annoyed me: the horizantally-split screen.  I never feel like I have enough vertical context for either my Zotero library or the web page I’m viewing.   Meanwhile, I’ve got a whole ‘nother monitor just sitting there empty. Some other folks have complained about this too, suggesting a sidebar view for Zotero.

Today, though, I realized that there’s a really obvious solution: just open up a new Firefox window (ctrl+n), put it on my other monitor, and display Zotero full-screen there.  Dual-monitor workflow bliss.

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

If you spend time doing research, you’re probably familiar with EndNote or RefWorks; this is the same idea, but with a couple advantages:

1. It’s integrated into your browser. You can download a citation on a web page to Zotero with one click.
2. It lets you write and store notes in the same database as your citations.
3. It’s free (as in both speech and beer).

It’s got a lot of other goodies, too: you can drag-and-drop citations into Word, OpenOffice, or an email; sort with tags and filters; full-text search as-you-type; and store and index pdf’s, web pages, and documents. The video below gives a three-minute overview:

Zotero has attracted some very positive attention. It’s funded by the Andrew W. Mellon and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations, and according to the website it’s also being recommended by libraries at institutions like Harvard, Cornell, Georgia Tech, and dozens more. Surprisingly, though, a lot of my colleagues have never heard of it. If my experience is any indication, that’s going to change.

I’ve been using Zotero for over a year now, and I can say it never fails to impress. Some of the things I love:

• If I want to store a copy of a PDF from a site, I just click and drag it to the correct Zotero entry. No stupid save dialogs.
• Organizing with tags, filters, and saved searches is way more flexible and powerful than nested folders.
• I hate wanting to cite something and not remembering what article it’s from. Indexed full-text search to the rescue. Love it.
• I hate typing. I love dragging several dozen references from Zotero to Openoffice and seeing them pop up as APA formatted citations.
• Having every thing I need–PDF, notes, citation–in one place for each article really speeds my workflow.
• And of course, I can’t even guess how much time one-click citation downloading has saved me over the last several hundreds of citations.

I could go on and on, but I’ll try to stop before(?) I become Mr. Obnoxious Open-Source Advocate Man.

And of course, there are some areas that could be improved. First, there are ways to make Zotero portable, so you can access you collections on different computers. There are ways…but there are not easy ways. The plan is for a central online space in which users can store collections; that would be a great solution, but it hasn’t happened yet. On the whole, Zotero is remarkably polished; there are, though, a few little annoyances here and there. If you generate a report for a collection, for instance, you can’t customize the fields (although see my Zotero report customizer here). Zotero is tied firmly to the Firefox browser; for some folks this is a distinct problem, regardless of how much we Fx users may love the ‘fox.

On the whole, though, I love Zotero. If you do research–especially if you’re not yet using a reference manager, you should give Zotero a look. I think it’s an open-source project that’s ready for the big time.