I’ve been getting my feet wet with Zotero, an amazing extension for Firefox that lets you organize research materials from within your web browser. It has a ton of interesting features, many of which are documented in these nice screencast tutorials. Among other things, it allows you to organize your sources into non-exclusive collections, add tags to them, add notes, add files, annotate sites and other files, store you PDFs and other off-line materials into logical groupings, and spit everything out in a variety of formats, including nicely formatted works cited pages (in MLA and many other formats).
I’m just scratching the surface of it at the moment. But I already like it. The coolest feature is that it can screenscrape a lot of the material that you need for a bibliographic entry straight fro the source, saving you a lot of typing. It even does this for book entires at Amazon.com and Google Scholar, saving you tons of time. Even better, it is able to take offline snapshots of research pages, which means you don’t have to have a continuous connection to, say, JSTOR to work with your research materials. Your data gets saved behind the scenes to an SQLite database.
You can link files arbitrarily to entries in your collections, which makes Zotero something like a DB-front-end to your file system, with all the searching and sorting capability that implies. It certainly beats the hell out of trying to remember where that article PDF you downloaded is now. Of course, you’ll want to be sure to include the arcane locations of the Zotero metadata to your backup strategy (more on that when I figure it out myself).
I figure I’ll use it to organize research I find whenever I work on expanding or creating new lectures for my online courses. I also have an article that I’ve been working on, in fits and starts, and this will come in very handy for organizing that research. But I’m keen to find some non-academic (or not strictly academic) uses for it as well. I mean, del.icio.us is handy and all, but sometimes you need a little more structure.