Zotero, that great note-taking research tool from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, has just been released in a standalone version [1] for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Until this point, Zotero had been a plugin for the Firefox browser. The standalone version has “connectors” available to link it to Chrome and Safari browsers (IE is coming); and plugins for MSWord and OpenOffice are bundled with it.
If you’ve been hesitating to try out Zotero because of the necessary linkage to Firefox, you should give it a whirl now. There’s an online Quick Start Guide [2] to get you going. As well, there are forums [3] where you can find the tips and the answers you might need to become proficient.
The Zotero style repository [4] contains various “default styles,” none of which is law-based. And though there are a few attempts to create legal citation style plugins in the “additional styles” list, none seems adequate yet. Surely it can’t be too hard a job for someone to produce a basic Canadian legal style for Zotero; citation styles for cases, statutes, journal articles and books would get us quite a distance along.