The Changing Face of Academic Research
Recently, Kim Reed challenged me to think about Microsoft Office 2007 - Word, in particular - and its automated bibliographic features. As an avid open-source software user, I had to close OpenOffice for a moment, bite the bullet, and find my way back to the world of Microsoft. I downloaded the free, 60-day trial version of Office 2007, installed it, and found that I am unable to access certain features of the application without purchasing the whole suite. So... arg!
It is exciting to imagine custom-tailoring a program like Word to suit our students' research needs; so, I haven't necessarily given up yet. But even OpenOffice 2.3 Writer, which is highly alterable for anyone so inclined, does not come out of the box with an integrated APA citation engine. Again: arg.
And yes, we could just do it the old-fashioned way, with books and paper... there's certainly no shame in that! However, some online searching led me to what may be the best thing since microfiche: Zotero.
Zotero!
Zotero is an add-on for the Firefox web browser which manages research and features APA integration (and so much more); I am considering ways to bring it into my classes as soon as possible. Check out the video tour and get psyched.
Get the Mozilla Firefox web browser here.
Get the Zotero extension for Firefox here.
Friday, January 11, 2008
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2 comments:
This does sound exciting! I haven't checked it out yet, but is it customizable? That is my biggest beef with Word 2007 -- that it doesn't conform with B&S APA Style Guide.
It appears so... I will be reading up here: http://dev.zotero.org/creating_citation_styles
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