Managing Information - Zotero

Increasingly the information arriving on the desk of business people comes in the form of the PDF document. Whether the document is the latest industry research, a board report, a tender document, the annual accounts of a subsidiary or a myriad of other information, it arrives as the attachment to an email and lives in the jungle that is the personal electronic filing system that emerges from a chaotic or busy workflow. When that document arrives, invited or not, it demands to be consumed, processed, stored, indexed, referenced, analysed and included.

Increasingly, I have become frustrated by these demands.  I find an interesting paper on Risk Management which I would like to use in a future lecture on the subject, but when the time comes I may not even remember I have it. I gather together a pile of research to support a due diligence study into a potential purchase of a port asset, but I find myself buried in folders, subfolders and strange file names. When I do read something relevant and want to use it, I have difficulty tracking it down when it comes to the final report preparation time and I find it time-consuming to include reference to it in my paper.  I read board papers from one of the companies which I serve, but spend hours searching through earlier editions to track the development of an issue.

I have recognised these problems for a long time but never had a useful tool to address.  Last month I found Zotero.

Zotero started life as a reference manager to manage bibliographic data for use by researchers or students in the humanities.  Since its initial release in 2006 by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, it has developed into a repository for pdf files, saved web pages and all types of documents and media including Microsoft Office Documents, photographs, sound files and screen shots.  It allows these files to be grouped into collections, even allowing a single item to be grouped into many different collections.  It supports tags and notes. It can automatically import or find the metadata and related bibliographic information for use in bibliographies or citations. Outlines, annotations and highlights can be captured from a pdf file, and your own notes and documents can be generated and grouped with the other collection items without leaving the software.

These features all support the Humanities student preparing a term paper, but what of the application to the business environment?  Perhaps I can best illustrate by describing the workflow I adopted in preparing a discussion paper on Risk Management.

I started by creating a collection in Zotero, and worked through my computer hard disk adding things to the collection. This collection included the Risk Management Standard and the accompanying Guidelines.  I also added some papers I had downloaded from Sydney University Library, some survey reports prepared by Deloitte over the years, and some of my own lectures and notes.  I searched the internet for some illustrative Creative Commons photographs and clipped them directly to Zotero.  I captured some web pages prepared by the Tasmanian Government and others by Infrastructure Australia for later reading.

I used a Zotero add-in to place copies of all these files onto my iPad for review in GoodReader, and spend my spare time on planes, in airports and the dentists waiting room to mark up and annotate the documents.  They were all waiting for me in Zotero when I next sat down to work on the paper and I quickly imported all the markups and notes to form the basis of my writing task.  I could use Zotero to go straight to the source of the markup and reread the section or the whole report if necessary, and I could create a reference list and citations from the best sources I found.

This only touches the surface of how useful the program has become to me. It is hard to overestimate the value of collecting all relevant information together in one place, carefully referenced and ready for review.  One particular strength of this feature is that when I prepare regular reports, say monthly or quarterly, I have the full documentation of the previous report at my fingertips.  I am also starting to compile my reference material on a few key subject areas into a reference collection in Zotero, including notes and resources.

The hardest thing about the information age is finding the needle in the haystack, Zotero arranges the haystack.  Most importantly it is free!

 Here.

 Have a look at it and let me know how you use it.