Zotero is a Firefox extension that I’ve been excited about for ages. It manages your references and other data, builds bibliographies (with plug-ins for Word and OpenOffice) and insert citations, allows you to make notes about references, and of course you can tag everything. On top of all that, you can synchronise your work (with the Beta 1.5 release) across locations, or with other researchers. So its a pretty serious collaborative research tool.

There are two great (and short) videos here and here that show you how it works. It’s been developed by the good people associated with the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University—and is open source. CHNM is also developing an open source platform for online exhibitions that I like, called Omeka.

These are tools that have a big aim - getting all (and they mean all) research material online for everyone, in a way that it can be worked with best by anyone who wants to. It’s all a big step towards fully open access research. The CHNM site is full of great resources for anyone working in the digital humanities.

A while back I interviewed the wonderful Elena Razlogova at Concordia University in Montréal, who is involved with CHNM projects (so many thanks to her). She worked on Scribe, which is a precursor to Zotero, and has now developed a great plug-in for media annotation, called Vertov.