Today the article "Why You Should Organize Your Personal Theological Library and a Way How" by Andy Naselli crossed my radar multiple times. While he focuses on theological libraries, his recommendation of Zotero can certainly apply to any library, not just theological ones.

While I heard of Zotero when Michael started grad school, I just started using it this fall. It is a tool for managing bibliographic information, so without seeing major research papers in my future I thought it sounded like something I might recommend but not have reason to use myself.

This fall, I started using it to manage various online resources. I was frustrated at difficulty finding an article I knew I had seen but couldn’t remember where, and my bookmarks weren’t quite handling it. I also thought that Zotero could be useful in improving my Links page, which is one of the changes I was hoping to make this fall.

Even without the research demands of a graduate student, I have found Zotero to be a worthwhile tool. While it might not be helpful for everyone, I have found it useful for a variety of purposes, such as organizing recipes or collecting all the reviews I see for a book that I’m interested in reading.

While so far I have only been using Zotero for electronic resources, I can see the benefit of adding in traditional books. I will probably add our books into Zotero over time, it is definitely an appealing place to store my notes.

Now if only we can find an aesthetically pleasing way to label our books to order our shelves by Library of Congress number. . .

Related:

Zotero

Andy Naselli’s article Why You Should Organize Your Personal Theological Library and a Way How

Thomas Keene’s guide for Zotero (seen in one source of the Naselli article crossing my path)