Zotero and the Clown Car in Oneonta

Today, we journeyed from our secluded little town to the main campus in Oneonta to learn more about the library resources that they had to offer.  Oneonta is about 30-40 minutes south of Cooperstown, and is the closet thing in the area to a large town, and by that I mean it has a Walmart and something it considers a mall.  I have yet to see the entire town so I don't know what else it has to offer, I believe that Oneonta has a single A baseball team as well.  The funny thing is that while Oneonta is considered a big town in Upstate New York, it is small compared to my hometown and most towns in Connecticut.  In the end it does have the important thing though, a Walmart Supercenter.

It was well worth the trip to the SUNY Oneonta main campus, because during the course of our class we were introduced to one life changing program called http://www.zotero.org/.  This is a program that hooks up to both your web-brower and word or open office.  It keeps track of all the books, journals, newspapers, articles, websites, etc. that you look at and want to use as sources in a paper, and records their citation information, then you can access all the information and have it automatically create footnotes for you in your word document.  I can't even begin to describe the number of features this program has, it even allows you to share your information with other users.  I have a good few hours of exploring its uses in front of me, but I swear its going to change my entire research process, and for the better.

On top of learning about this amazing program, six of needed to return to campus right after class and had to fit into one car, so that was interesting.  As soon as we reached the car, we saw a cop sitting the parking lot looking around, and now had to pile into the car in front of him.  Two people sat in the front and then four of us were crammed into the backseat for the thirty minute ride home.  It was definitely not comfortable but certainly funny.  Luckily we made it back alive.