Narrative, Blogs, and Social Knowledge Management

I’m using Zotero to organize my sources and notes. There are reasonable criticisms, but I say Zotero rocks. So does Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed. My basic reasons for Zotero love:

1. It’s free.
2. It’s a Firefox extension.
3. It doesn’t crash my computer (as EndNote does).
4. It doesn’t lock my bibs up in proprietary formats (as EndNote does).

Now if it just had a sidebar (when so many of us have widescreens, why do developers not think of putting those controls at the side instead of hogging up page space at the bottom or the top à la the Microsoft Office ribbon?)….

I may add some sources here… or I may just upgrade Zotero and check out its save-to-server feature (yum… I’m going downloading right now!).

In the meantime, if you’re curious about sources, drop me a line via the comment section. Tell me what you need and I’ll take heed and lead you in the right direction for bibliographic selections….

Update 2009.10.01: O.K., I'm biting that bullet and syncing my Zotero bib online. For instance, now whenever I want to cite Laszlo and Laszlo (2002), I can give a hyperlink. Go ahead, click it! Presto: bib info on the article that defines social knowledge management.

Now that doesn't provide a complete bibliography with all the sources together on one page... yet. That sounds like a knowledge management task for the end: when I produce the final document, I can go back to Zotero, create a folder called "Dissertation Bibliography" (or, Politburo style, "DissBib") and move copies of every cited work into it. Then you'll be able to access that universal list on my online Zotero library (and as a boring old print version bound here in the library... if you really, really, really want paper but don't want to hit print on your own machine).

But for now, we have the perfect working bib. As I write, I can make links to the full bib info. As you read, you can check individual citations of interest.