OK, personal digital assistants (PDA’s) have become a de rigeur pocket accessory; providing order and nagging reminders through out the day. Wouldn’t it be cool if there were something similar for all your research? Well the dawn of the personal research assistant is upon us. The heavyweights are OneNote and Evernote. These are the electronic equivalents of your notepad/3-ring binder. With either, their utility is limited by your inventiveness. However, if all you need is a little help with research tasks, consider using the Firefox  add-in Zetero.

Zetero automatically captures citation information from web pages, allows you to capture and annotate images, web pages, links, etc right in your browser, and then store your searches before exporting your data to Word, OpenOffice or WordPress (great for  jotting down ideas for that next blog entry).