tools for research

25 library research tools, posted on collegedegree.com - the best one is #7, just because my partner developed it

Well, actually a bit more than that.  She set up an RSS - real simple syndication - feed for new arrivals in the University Library. It is the best way to keep track of lots of different streams of information.  Personally I use google reader (o’course) to aggregate all the blogs and web news feeds I read.  You may even be using a feed reader to read this!  Lots of software can do this for you - mac mail, outlook, firefox… but I prefer the online ones like reader and bloglines.

I was thinking about using google documents for my research experiment this semester - using online ‘free’ tools.  ars technica had and interesting article about zoho - an online word-processor that syncs with google gears for off-line (god forbid) use.  As much as a google-head as I am, I’ll give it a whirl - it seems free, there are no ads…  perhaps they are following the same business model as google and charging businesses only.  Without mail though, I don’t see it as particularly compelling for them.  Zoho and Zotero, sounds exotic.

After a few days thinking and talking to my collegues, I’ve decided on the software I’m going to use for the first experiment: google documents (with google gears for offline help) and zotero all running on Firefox.  The first task is going to see if I want to run this portably, using a nice USB key as my repository.  This is because its tricky to share zotero between browsers, but I think the zotero server may solve that at some point in the future.

The first problem is I don’t see a Harvard reference style for zotero, and that’s the style I’m expected to use in social sciences here at Otago.  I’ve used a hacked version of Harvard in endnote before, so I’ll have to find something similar.

Can you do a university course using open source and free online software? I’m going to try to do an entire semester’s work without touching proprietary applications. The goals are:

• Interoperability - everyone has to be able to read my work at the end
• Cross platform - I should be able to work at a PC _and_ a Mac, though as I’m not working on a linux box ATM I’m not going to test that.

the tools I’ll need are (to begin with);

• An editor
• biblographical software
• notes storage

Any suggestions?