My name is Shaine, and I am a data hoarder.
For the past four-or-so years, I’ve used a tool called Zotero to collect and process books and online media. Zotero is a (completely) free research assistant. Before you dismiss this as an academic practice that probably doesn’t apply to you, let me first make this pitch:
We are all researchers of the world and our interests.
The normal cast of solutions don’t work.
You probably already have a set of tools for managing your intake of information. Unless you’ve invested a great amount of time into it, you probably regard it as mediocre but passable for the amount of effort you’re willing to exert for it. It’s lossy. It’s messy. Sometimes you wish you had a way to remember every book you’ve read, or to find again that article with that great advice so you can share it in its original prose. Maybe you know exactly how to find it again, but due to the natural rot of the internet, your bookmark points to a 404 page.
Oh well, nothing to be done about it now. Right?
The best time to make an improvement is now, though, even if you can’t recover from those failures in the moment. You can at least make sure they don’t occur again.
Zotero is the perfect solution to these classes of problem. It effectively replaces most use cases for many neighboring tools such as:
- Browser bookmarks
- Keeping every tab you’ve ever opened until the sun dies or the occasional purifying power of a browser crash visits you
- Lists on places like YouTube
- Various impermanent histories like in the browser or Slack
Zotero specializes in collection and archival.
Far and away, my favorite feature of Zotero is that it creates an archived version of anything you put into it. When you trigger the browser plugin to clip a webpage, it sends the metadata for storage in Zotero and compiles the webpage into a static local version. That copy is more than just the webpage, too—it’s a file you can open and mark up in Zotero.
All of the tagging, organizing, and searching features you could want out of such a tool are fully baked-in.
Zotero also offers a considerable amount of free storage online for backing up and syncing your archive between devices. I used it for the first few years without getting close to the limit. More storage can be purchased pretty inexpensively… but I’ve found this unnecessary. Zotero integrates simply with WebDAV servers, too, so you can switch from their hosting to your own without much difficulty at all. I host mine through my Synology NAS.
Zotero offers apps on all major operating systems and mobile devices. Unfortunately, the webpage clipping feature only works when done from a desktop browser, but aside from that, each platform is full-featured. Mobile devices can still send items to Zotero, just without the snapshot file.
With these features, we can get away from the inadequacy of bookmarks and long-running tabs, paid services like Pocket, and we can dodge the slow corrosion of content on the internet.
My progress.
My archive contains over 1,000 items (almost 600 of which are, embarassingly, unread). I started it in 2020. This is a tool I use every single day, and how I manage it has evolved significantly over the years.
In my next post, I’ll go through how I structure and refine what I’ve captured. I strongly believe in the usefulness of aggregating content this way and then putting it to work. I also believe that anyone can use it in its most basic way and still get great value from their collection practice.
Give it a try for a few months, won’t you?