I tried expensive bibliographic software programs (one was $500), and they were never satisfactory - glitchy, limited, and poorly supported. I don’t have the right to demand service or updates or improvements.Ĭould I entrust my doctoral dissertation to this product? Can the developer be committed to this product long-term, I have to ask? Does the company care about winning my business? If they let me have the product without charging for it, they owe me nothing.
Generally speaking, I don’t trust software that is free and unadorned. It sounds like a superficial or even counterintuitive reason to bypass it. I credit it with making my doctoral dissertation manageable. I cringe at the memory that I almost let this treasure get away. Sign up here to be notified of new posts to the Golden Egg Genealogist. We need a tool that makes sure we can find our way back to what we have gathered - a tool that maximizes its value to us. We gather everything that might be tied to our family. Our research is much bigger than that, though, isn’t it? We find a deed book in the county records office where our ancestors lived. The genealogist who is searching for a single isolated fact in a single isolated place might find this product overkill. It allows limitless note taking, flexible organization, elimination of redundant notes, access to data wherever you have Internet access, lightning-fast searches, and so many other tools. Zotero allows the genealogist to capture bibliographic references with the click of a button. But once I knew what Zotero could do, I could not bear to keep doing things the hard way. I have all these things and have valued them. You have Microsoft Word, Excel, and Access. Maybe you use OneNote to gather notes as you read materials. Why do you need a tool “to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources”? You have source citation tools in your genealogy software, right? You have your trusty Research Log. Some genealogists will look at Zotero’s self-definition and draw the quick conclusion that it brings little new to the table. In Part 1 of my Zotero series, I tell you why you should bother. Sync to free cloud storage and get your notes anywhere there’s Internet access! It got me through graduate school, and now it’s revolutionizing my genealogy. Attach images, documents, spreadsheets, and PDFs. You can cite sources with a single click. This robust, free tool simplifies the capture, organization, and use of citations and research notes. We can do it the hard way, or we can use Zotero. Genealogy requires us to capture and organize mounds of information.