From zero to zotero

Thing 18 and now 23 Things fatigue is starting to set in - already drinking Coke at 10am and doing this on my day off. Still, zotero is a welcome addition to my knowledge of new tools and one that may be particularly useful to research students. Perhaps one of the reasons I'm finding it hard to get excited about this one is I don't have an immediate use for it and don't see that I can really merit the time to explore it to the extent that would do it justice. Perhaps if I was currently doing research myself, rather than trying to learn Polish, I would be getting more excited. Similarly at work, I am usually behind the scenes providing the catalogue records that others may want to add to their Zotero library rather than in a position where I would be helping library users get the best from it. It does concern me slightly that if librarians are not using this themselves are they really the best people to be training others to use it - would this not perhaps best be done in the faculty by other students/researchers? I get the distinct impression that entirely successful use of this tool would require investing quite a lot of time and effort and unless you are continuously researching / publishing think you will only be using a small percentage of its capability. Still I will endeavour to keep using it for things of interest I come across, hopefully in this way becoming more familiar with it and recognising it's potential. I hope, as the computing service and others have suggested, that it won't slow my Firefox down too much and think it will be some time before I need to worry about the effect of a very large database of references.
Image courtesy of jazzmodeus via FlickrCC