I think the websites we were shown were awesome. I personally have not used them but I have looked into them to really see what they are about. Zotero is a personal research assistant. It allows users to keep track of books and articles. It also allows you to add pictures/ images, audio and video files. These (re)sources are not kept in folders, they are kept in collections and sub-collections (think of Itunes) and then you are able to organize them anyway you want. You can also use tags/keywords to help locate specific sources. The one of the most helpful places on the site is the citation feature. It helps with the bibliography no matter the style of format! The sync feature automatically synchronizes your collections on all of your devices. You have access to your Zotero account using any web browser around the world. The collaboration feature allows groups to share their research materials; these groups can be public or private. This is one site that will be very helpful with keeping all my sources organized for different projects.
I am a huge advocate of Zotero, I cannot speak highly enough of it. I have used it for three projects and plan on continuing to build my research library throughout my career with it. I absolutely love that I can use my browser to navigate to a library entry, or even the Amazon page for a book and with the click of a button automatically import all of the bibliographic information for that book. Another handy feature is the tagging, it uses the Library of Congress MARC data to create data tags of the books, which you can add to, and then search your source library for tags to use in future research. My favorite part of this automatic import is that it saves a link to the PDF of the article in the bibliographic information, so the next time you want to use that article, you just look in Zotero and click the link to find it.
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