A Scholar's Toolbox
There are a number of free Internet products and services available to facilitate scholarly research. The following is a non-exhaustive list of applications of use to scholars in locating, organizing, and citing books, articles, and online resources.
LibX
LibX is an extention for Firefox that creates a toolbar in your browser for searching your local library. The Ithaca College edition can be downloaded here. In addition to the toolbar, LibX creates a right-click menu giving researchers the ability to highlight any term on the web and search for it in their library or in Google Scholar. LibX also creates links in pages that include resources related to your library. So, for instance, you can search amazon.com for a book and a link will be created to the Ithaca College Library catalog. When articles are displayed in the browser, a link appears in the address bar that allows you to add the article to CiteULike.
Zotero
Zotero is an extention for Firefox that allows you to save articles in your browser. It also lets you save snapshots of web pages, for instance if you want to save an image of what the New York Times site looked like on a particular day. Zotero allows you to organize your research materials in folders, but also provides a tagging capability similar to social bookmarking sites. Finally, citations can be dragged and dropped into a Word document and automatically formatted according to a variety of bibliographic styles. Remember that since Zotero is in your browser, you cannot access your Zotero library from other computers.
Please see our Brief Guide to Using Zotero
Connotea
Connotea is a social bookmarking service similar to del.icio.us, but specifically designed for scholarly use by the Nature Publishing Group. It allows users to save their bookmarks on a server so that they can be accessed from anywhere and to use tags to label and organize their links. Connotea links can be exported in RIS or BibTeX format to be imported to bibliographic management programs like EndNote.
CiteULike
CiteULike, like Connotea, is a social bookmarking site for scholarly resources. Judging from the tag cloud on their site, it seems to be used primarily by natural scientists.It allows importing and exporting via RIS and BibTeX. If you have LibX installed, links will appear next to your items allowing you to search for them in Ithaca College Library's online holdings.
