New Bibliography Tool for Scholars
Friday August 25, 2006
For those among us who write about Art History (or any other research topic), either by choice or because it has been assigned, here is some exciting news. Scholar, a new tool that promises to store web citations into the user's browser interface, will be made available for public Beta-testing in September. Created with $250,000 (US) in funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, Scholar will be offered as an extension for the Firefox browser. (If you're not familiar with it, Firefox is a free, customizable, open source web browser - which means that Scholar, too, will be free for Firefox users.)
Scholar claims it will " ...enable users to grab, with a single click, a citation to a book, journal article, archival document, or museum object and store it in their browser. Researchers will then be able to take notes on the reference, link that reference to others, and organize both the metadata and annotations." Bring it on, Scholar development team! As more and more arts libraries become digitized, more research will be done online and we'll probably all find such a tool proportionately beneficial.
Why am I letting my closeted computer nerd out over this? You wouldn't believe how many hundreds of megabytes' worth of text documents crammed full of citations and parenthetic "notes to self" - from books, primary source documents, articles, Grove Art entries and museum captioning - I've got floating around my system. They are filed in a roughly 20-tier folder hierarchy that even its creator sometimes has difficulty navigating. On a slow writing day, my computer's desktop typically has "to be filed" icons, folders, jpeg image files and documents marching fully three-quarters of the way across it. Any tool that promises to help ease the burden of organization and allow faster work is worth getting excited about.
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Scholar claims it will " ...enable users to grab, with a single click, a citation to a book, journal article, archival document, or museum object and store it in their browser. Researchers will then be able to take notes on the reference, link that reference to others, and organize both the metadata and annotations." Bring it on, Scholar development team! As more and more arts libraries become digitized, more research will be done online and we'll probably all find such a tool proportionately beneficial.
Why am I letting my closeted computer nerd out over this? You wouldn't believe how many hundreds of megabytes' worth of text documents crammed full of citations and parenthetic "notes to self" - from books, primary source documents, articles, Grove Art entries and museum captioning - I've got floating around my system. They are filed in a roughly 20-tier folder hierarchy that even its creator sometimes has difficulty navigating. On a slow writing day, my computer's desktop typically has "to be filed" icons, folders, jpeg image files and documents marching fully three-quarters of the way across it. Any tool that promises to help ease the burden of organization and allow faster work is worth getting excited about.
Related Articles:
- Firefox - The Searcher's Browser from About Websearch
- Review: Firefox Browser 1.5 from About Internet for Beginners
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