Wow. Zotero. Is it a dream or a nightmare?

On the surface, Zotero is a research tool that allows you to incorporate pretty much everything you want to a personal library. This means (very, but very basically) that you can have all the stuff you have gathered on a particular topic easily accesible and together.

Wow. Sounds great? Even fun? Well, it is not. It may be, perhaps even in the near future. But right now Zotero poses for me more problems than it solves, basically because I have done most of the research for my doctoral dissertation and it would be time-consuming to transfer that data to Zotero.

However,  that is not the reason why I feel Zotero is a nightmare. Zotero is the elephant in the room.

 The elephant in the room, lurking in my bookshelf…

Until today I had not realised that I have organised my primary sources (and even my secondary sources for that matter) in a disastrous way. Let me explain the situation: for the past four years I have collected a large volume of information on women artists active in Buenos Aires in the long 19th century. I am talking about 130 GB of information. Images, words and even sound files that are basically uncategorised. It is, to put it bluntly, a messy system.

I need to finish my dissertation, not only because I have to. You see, I really want to use Zotero, the tool that is dreamy and nightmarish at one.