As the instructional design specialist at UIT-AT, I keep scribbled notes, bookmark info, and email myself urls with ideas that may be of use to Tufts faculty, students and staff in the future. One such scribbled note that said simply SmartFox led me to a next-generation open source research tool that is now called Zotero http://www.zotero.org/.
The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University is building this package of tools for libraries and museums that "will enable vastly simplified citation management, note taking, and advanced scholarly research right within the Firefox browser." Although currently in private beta mode, a public beta version will be released this fall.
Some of the features described at the Zotero site include:
Capturing citation information a web page automatically, without typing or cutting and pasting and saving this information directly into the correct fields (e.g., author, title, etc.) of a Zotero library.
Storing—beyond citations—PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages
Allowing easy notetaking on the research materials that are captured
Easily organizing research materials in multiple ways, such as folders, saved searches (smart folders), and tags
The need for such tools to help organize, annotate and use the vast number of resources available through university library and other online databases is growing each year as faculty and students are struggling not to be overwhelmed with digital information overload. Evidently the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recognizes this need and has given the Center a grant to build in major new features for the 2007 Zotero release.
In a similar development, the Mellon Foundation recognized the value of UIT-AT Director David Kahle's vision for a concept-mapping tool that would help faculty and students visually structure digital content from myriad data sources and repositories. The result is the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE), which is is available for free download at: http://vue.tccs.tufts.edu/
"Using VUE's concept mapping interface, faculty and students design semantic networks of digital resources drawn from digital libraries, local and remote file systems and the Web. The resulting content maps can then be viewed and exchanged online."
