Zotero is a tool for storing, retrieving, organizing, and annotating digital documents. It has been available for not quite a year. I started using it about six weeks ago, and am still learning some of the fine points, but feel sufficient enthusiasm about Zotero to recommend it to anyone doing research online. If very much of your work involves material from JSTOR, for example – or if you find it necessary to collect bibliographical references, or to locate Web-based publications that you expect to cite in your own work — then Zotero is worth knowing how to use. (You can install it on your computer for free; more on that in due course.)

Now, my highest qualification for testing a digital tool is, perhaps, that I have no qualifications for testing a digital tool. That is not as paradoxical as it sounds. The limits of my technological competence are very quickly reached. My command of the laptop computer consists primarily of the ability to (1) turn it on and (2) type stuff. This condition entails certain disadvantages (the mockery of nieces and nephews, for example) but it makes for a pretty good guinea pig.

And in that respect, I can report that the folks at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media have done an exemplary job in designing Zotero. A relatively clueless person can learn to use it without exhaustive effort....