Short form: If you're a busy freelance writer you need Zotero http://www.zotero.org/
Okay, I admit it. I'm a research junkie. I spend between four and ten hours a day on the web doing research either for paying projects or for things I'm interested in. In a typical day I'll visit over a hundred web pages, blogs, forums, video sites and just about anything else I can find. I read about two dozen news sites a day looking for story ideas.
According to my browsing history, today I looked up information on howitzers, Mandarin Fish (the salt water ornamental, not the Chinese delicacy), dirty data, the closest office of my cell phone company, team-building techniques for sales, a site listing freelance writing jobs nationally, a couple of obscure points about security, the situation in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, the local Craigslist, high-performance file systems, a couple of knowledgebase articles at Microsoft.com (I don't remember what that was about, but it seemed important at the time) and some other stuff I've forgotten.
Out of that I had to distill information for three or four articles I am working on, several things I'm interested in personally. I want to save that information so I can find it again. I also need to record any ideas I may want to develop and pitch to three or four different editors, and occasionally cross-reference my haul with other previously saved items.
While I've tried note taking programs before, I never liked any of them. My work is too diverse, too voluminous and I need too many things to be satisfied with any of the tools I've come across before now. So I did most of this with a mishmash of bookmark files, word processor documents and printouts.
A lot of printouts, because I wanted to find what was in some of those articles quickly. When I had the printout I'd go though and highlight the important points, perhaps one paragraph in a five or ten-page article. After my assignment was done and my article saw print, I'd wait a reasonable time had passed for possible outraged screams from readers, I'd dump all those printouts. I couldn't save them because a) I didn't have room and b) the information might be out of date when I went to re-use it.
I went through reams of paper that way. In fact I have a file of printouts nearly four inches thick from a single project I wound up just before I discovered Zotero.
Ah, Zotero. The researcher's friend and the freelance writer's lifeline.
Zotero is a Firefox plugin that helps you organize information. Or as the web site has it, it lets you collect, manage and cite your research sources. Both of those are inadequate descriptions.
Zotero was written by researchers for researchers and it is invaluable when you're winnowing through dozens or hundreds of web pages and other documents trying to find information specifically related to what you're doing.
When working with web pages, Zotero lets you save either a reference to a page, which will take you back to the page with a mouse click, a link to the page or take a snapshot of the page and store it locally. It also lets you organize your references into libraries and sub-libraries. And then the fun begins.
In addition to organizing material into libraries, Zotero lets you tag documents with as many user-definable tags as you want, refer to other relevant documents you've saved, add multiple notes, including quotations from a document (online or printed), add independent notes which aren't connected to any document, and annotate the heck out of anything.
Don't want to cut and paste references? Zotero can automatically capture references from a lot of sites which have been made Zotero-aware. These are mostly academic and university library sites and the list is growing constantly.
All this resides in a window at the bottom of your browser screen you can open and close with the click of a mouse.
One particularly nice feature is that your work is saved automatically as you enter it. Makes it a lot harder to lose anything.
Like most Firefox plug-ins Zotero is free for the downloading. The documentation is online and, unfortunately, there is manual you can download and print out. Since the site isn't well cross-referenced, you'll probably flounder around some before you figure out exactly how to do some of the stuff you'll want to do. However the learning curve is pretty shallow. I had Zotero mostly mastered in a couple of days, in spite of a printing problem that had nothing to do with the program.
Zotero works with the latest versions of Firefox on Windows, Linux and Macs. It won't necessarily work with older versions. There are also plugins available to integrate Zotero with Microsoft Word and OpenOffice. While the product is highly functional as it stands, it is still a work in progress and I'd suggest joining the forums on the Zotero web site for support and to keep up with new features that might help you.
I have pretty much given up my printouts and stopped using bookmark files to store and organize this information. Zotero does a much better job of all of that for me.
Which is not to say writers won't find Zotero a little odd. Zotero was written to help academics prepare research papers, complete with bibliographies, and a lot of its features -- and a great deal of the documentation -- have no relevance outside of that tight little world. For example, Zotero allows you to prepare bibliographies in one of three or four different academic styles, including MLA, APA and three different versions of the Chicago Manual of Style. That's a big deal if you're an academic and pretty much useless otherwise.
If you're still doing research papers, this is a killer tool. If you're a writer who needs to do a lot of research for articles, it's still a killer tool. If you're writing fiction and you need to get a handle on your research, it's still darned handy.
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