Maestro ZOTERO

After finding out about Zotero, what can I say. I just wish I was born 30 years later! It was great to witness the first dog in space, the first woman there ("Valentina, oh Valentina!"), first men on the moon (even if it might not really have happened), the triumphant march of The Beatles across the globe. Those were the days! However, with all those interesting things happening around us (also with much more fun than young people have today, I dare say - Mamma mia!), we had to work really hard to collect and manage all the information needed to write a book, an article, a dissertation. I still have boxes of little index cards filled with all the information both needed and not to produce anything in written form. How difficult it was to find anything in the sea of all those index cards. Not to mention all those tonnes of bound, heavy volumes of journals I was carrying from the library to my office to search for those references. I did not like studying in the library back then. I did not know what my fate was going to bring.
But this was my "previous" life. Today it is goodbye to index cards, filing boxes and cabinets. Today there is Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley and probably much, much more. How able these programmes are! Easy collecting, managing, formatting citations. "Cite when you write" - how can anyone resist! How much time may be saved and used for something better than making notes, loosing them, trying to find them and ... making them again. Who knows, I might even start researching something. Perhaps I should write a book? Everybody apparently carries one inside them. If not me, definitely our students, at least those who are not afraid of computers, should be using help like Zotero. And it is our (library staff) duty (and pleasure) to tell them all about it. So let's explore more - let's work harder! With better results, I hope, than in Orwell's "Animal Farm".

P.S. The intriguing name ZOTERO has very interesting etymology.