One thing I tend to do in the spring is go through the tips and tricks I picked up over the course of the year. This compilation of electronic research advice and tools is certainly not comprehensive, but I hope it makes your research a little easier.

Zotero - I've used this for about a year now and it's still one of my favorites. This is a firefox addon that organizes cites and allows you to save articles. I use this in two ways - (1) to put articles I encounter but don't have time to read at the moment into the "hopper" - they will still be there three months later when I need that card, (2) to save articles before I get on the plane or head to some other internet-free location. Yes, there are other ways to do this, but this is the best I've found for rapid saving as I troll through articles. You just click the Zotero save button and it saves the full text of that article (and its formatting!) for offline viewing.

Google Reader - This is one that many (if not most) debaters now use, but it's useful enough to deserve a review. Google reader is a feed reader - it monitors blogs and websites that you tell it to monitor and brings new articles to you in a convenient, "all in one place" format. You can then tag articles to sort or read later, star articles that are particularly good, and easily share and email articles to your teammates - all in one window. All of this works using the RSS feed format. There's really nothing special about google reader compared to other feed readers except that it integrates with the gmail and google apps format, and you can switch to "offline" mode to read articles when you don't have internet access.

The other useful part of google reader is that you can add a google news search to your feed reader. So, if you've been assigned to cut uniqueness for the Law of the Sea Treaty, you can do your google news search for "Law of the Sea Treaty." Then look in the lower left hand corner of the screen for the little orange button that says "RSS." Click on that and then click "subscribe to this feed." All new articles on google news with the terms "Law of the Sea Treaty" will now pop up in your feed reader. Combining this with "or" commands makes it even more useful. You can do your google news search for "Law of the Sea Treaty" OR "universal health care" OR ... and add that to your feed reader.

Many websites and thinktanks also have specific areas set up - so you don't need to subscribe to the entire set of postings, you can choose which feeds fit your topic or area of research and pick accordingly. Look for a button that says "RSS" and follow the directions to add to your feed reader. You can also do searches for "poverty RSS feeds" or "death penalty RSS feeds," etc. that will help you find additional sources.

Once you have a few feeds set up, it will also begin to recommend feeds to you under the tab "Browse for stuff" - generally, it's pretty smart. Policy debaters - if you find good poverty feeds, add them to the comments!

PDF Converters - Some PDFs allow you to save, copy and paste the text. Those are generally very easy to use. Others, however, do not allow easy saving or copying of text. For these, there is an easier way to work with them than the screenshot, and a cheaper way than OCR software. There are a number of websites that will convert PDFs to Word documents for free. Two that I have used with some success are PDF-to-Word converter (http://www.pdftoword.com/) and CometDocs (http://www.cometdocs.com/). In my experience, PDF-to-Word is a bit faster, but CometDocs has more options (including converting between different types of picture files).

Dates into Google - Google is obviously awesome. That said, sometimes you need a recent card, and the cards on the CTBT from the Clinton Administration won't cut it. Here are two neat ways to add dates to google (courtesy of the Lifehacker blog):

#1 - Sort by Date. This is particularly useful if you are doing a google search over the course of the year or topic and want only the articles that have come up on google since your last search. The steps are simple:

- Do your search as usual. I searched for "comprehensive test ban treaty" (in quotation marks to preserve the phrase).

- The first hit that comes up is relatively recent, but by the bottom of the page, they start to get pretty old - not very useful, especially if I've done this search before.

- The URL for my search is: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22comprehensive+test+ban+treaty%22&aq=f&oq=&safe=active

- To the END of that URL, add: &as_qdr=d so that the URL now looks like this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22comprehensive+test+ban+treaty%22&aq=f&oq=&safe=active&as_qdr=d. Like magic, your search has been sorted by date and the date has been added to the search listing under each link.

#2 - List Date. If you don't need to sort the search by date, but you do want to be able to see that an article is from 1955 before you click on it, follow the same procedure as above, but add &as_qdr=y15 to the end of your search.

Debate Encyclopedia - This isn't a new site but is still awesome. If you've been assigned something and you don't know where to start (or what the argument even is!) try the SDI Debate Encyclopedia (http://sdiencyclopedia.wikispaces.com/). It has definitions of terms from "'games theory" to "overidentification" to "carbon tax."

Mozy - This is an online backup software that works in the background. Storage is free up to 2GB, which is probably plenty for your debate files and maybe your school files too. Once you tell it what to index, it will back up your data without you having to remember to do it. Pretty awesome. This is what you'll wish you have when you spill Red Bull on your computer right before a file is due. (Thanks to Ross Smith of Wake Forest for this one).

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