[Note: All 'Tools' posts cite directly from their home page. My own comments appear in green, after the linebreak.]
www.zotero.org
Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).
The 1.0 release of Zotero already provides advanced functionality for gathering, organizing, and scanning one’s research, as well as significant import/export capabilities (including integration with Word and an API for communication with any program or service on the web). In 2007, Zotero users will gain the ability to share and collaborate on their collections with other users through an exchange server, and receive recommendations and feeds of new resources that might be of interest to them. In short, over the next year Zotero will expand from an already helpful browser extension into a full-fledged tool for digital research and collaboration.
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I discovered Zotero last spring when I was finishing up with my Master's degree. It was an extremely helpful way for me to keep track of articles and resources for quick reference as I wrote my final papers. Integrating it with Word enabled me to put together footnotes in a flash, and the dreaded compiling of the bibliography was accomplished for me with a simple click of the button.
But definitely one of the great attractions to me with Zotero is its ability to search full-text any pages you save to it. Unfortunately this doesn't include pdfs yet, but there is some work being done to include even these I think (though not "image only pdfs"). The potential is there, however, for any article you would find on Search Pigeon (or any other portal to open access content) to be downloaded to your Zotero bibliography and then searched (even offline, I think) whenever you like! An incredible possibility, it seems to me.
[Remember, though, that if you download to Zotero something that is on EBSCOhost while you have access to EBSCOhost (I just use it as an example), you will not have access to this once you lose your access to EBSCOhost -- unlike the content of open access journals.
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