The policemen are getting younger, the music’s too loud and what are those young people wearing??   I think I’m getting old, which surely beats the alternatives,  especially as some things are so much better than they were back in the day.  Who would want to go back to old ways of managing notes and reading?

Doing my first degree back in (ahem..) the eighties, we had the miracle of fiche and, sometimes, computerised catalogues.  I photocopied everything in sight, and threw most of it away when I graduated.  Writing an essay meant piles of books, papers, notes, filing cards and little scraps of paper.

Now, it’s all on my wee laptop.  I search for papers online, through one of the databases provided by the University, or Google Scholar.   Wikipedia’s open in another tab to quickly explain phrases I don’t know, and the Engineering Toolbox is never far away.

All those printouts and filing cards have disappeared and in their place is the miracle that is Zotero.

Zotero is a free addon to Firefox which stores any sort of document, allows you to tag it, indexes,  keeps your notes, and produces a bibliograpy.  Inside MS Word, its a push of a button to insert a reference, and the bibliography is created automatically.

If I’ve got a book, I go straight to Amazon, find the book, click a button and my reference is created.  If the paper is in any one of a number of online databases, ScienceDirect, Wiley InterScience or whatever, I push a button and the reference is there with the paper downloaded.  If its an ordinary webpage, a youtube video, a newspaper article, Zotero will have a go.  At worst, I can type it in.

My entire degree is in Zotero.   It’s an extension of my brain.   In case you were wondering, yes,  it is backed up, automagically and constantly, to JungleDisk, an online backup service that costs me about $5 a month.

And those young people are looking great!