Replacement for OneNote?
I've stored my dissertation notes in OneNote, and the bibliographic references in EndNote. I'd love to be able to junk both those apps, particularly OneNote. In order to do so, I need:
* the confidence that I can keep my life's work in zotero w/out it disappearing (so online storage would be preferable to desktop storage; I'd even be willing to pay for something like a "gold" account to be able to store *a lot* of data)
* the ability to print out or export my bibliographic info *and* notes, either in whole or in part, as text or even rtf
* searchable notes that don't show me only which references contain the search term or terms, but also show me either the location(s) of the search hits or, at least, some of the surrounding text (i.e., something that looks/works like OneNote)
* the confidence that I can keep my life's work in zotero w/out it disappearing (so online storage would be preferable to desktop storage; I'd even be willing to pay for something like a "gold" account to be able to store *a lot* of data)
* the ability to print out or export my bibliographic info *and* notes, either in whole or in part, as text or even rtf
* searchable notes that don't show me only which references contain the search term or terms, but also show me either the location(s) of the search hits or, at least, some of the surrounding text (i.e., something that looks/works like OneNote)
1. The only way you can be sure of your work not dissappearing is to back it up yourself. Zotero does have online database functionality in the works, but even if it's carefully done (which I assume it will be), you'd be silly not to take your life's work into your own hands.
This is raw speculation, but I imagine the primary storage location for zotero's data will still be the local computer (in SQL lite, as offered by Firefox).
2. The good news is this makes your data able to be easily backed up by any number of applications.
3. You can export both bibliographic data and notes in a few data storage formats (XML based, and possible to do something with even if Zotero and all it's users dissapeared overnight). And you can generate a 'report' and see it all in HTML, which is pretty usable as well.
4. Showing context of found text while searching: Is this possible with SQL lite? I don't know, but I'd be very glad to have it. It's not especially necessary for searching bibliographic data itself, but for searching my own notes and various attachments it would be brilliant. Anyone know if we can hope for this?
Providing this for notes or bibliographic data, which are stored in SQLite, could be done, but it's considerably more complicated and might be somewhat slow, as the content of each matching field and note would have to be loaded into JavaScript and searched individually. We'd also need an algorithm for displaying useful snippets for non-phrase searches—ideally favoring consecutive words, displaying multiple excerpts separated by ellipses for non-consecutive words, etc. We have a ticket for this, though, and it'll get done eventually.