During the last weeks of history grad school, I looted went through JSTOR and saved copies of some of the articles that I thought I'd still like to read later, after my access to the university's subscription ran out. I ended up with enough files to want to organize them with keywords and inter-links between related files (articles with comments and responses, book review fora, etc.), but without enough motivation to do so. I have some expensive software that can do that (which I bought during grad school), but it's not all that easy to use and it would cost even more to set it up to automatically collect bibliographic information. So instead I've been taking the somewhat slow route of searching the "articles" folder for a file when I want it.

Meanwhile, I've been reading or hearing about Zotero, an open-source firefox add-on that allows you to take notes, save, highlight, and annotate webpages, and do all sorts of other nice things on the web. It can even pick up bibliographic info from supported websites. I finally installed it tonight and as far as my JSTOR collection goes, it looks like it's going to be great. I don't need a subscription to get the citations; it only takes one click to download the relevant info from the JSTOR page. And I can easily match up that info with the pdf files I have - which can be linked directly to the entry in my Zotero collection. Plus, I can probably finally abandon the highlight/annotate bookmarking service I've been using for years, which has been ok for highlights, but which I haven't found the greatest when it comes to searching my collection or actually saving pages rather than links.

I'll stop with the advertising now - no, I'm not affiliated with the Zotero people, though I wouldn't hide that if I were - but it really is worth checking out.