Please tell me you didn’t type out your last bibliography by hand.  If you’re in the business of writing academic papers, handling your sources manually is the equivalent of using a manual typewriter.  Please spare yourself a few weeks and consider Zotero.  Zotero is an extension for Firefox that provides a wonderful database for all of your sources.  It can automatically capture citations of books, journals and websites.  It can organize all of your sources by tagging or placing them into collections.  It can even automatically create footnotes and bibliographies.  Visit the site and watch the video to get a visual demonstation of just what Zotero can do.

Whenever I begin a new research assignment, I create a new collection in my Zotero database.  As I begin reading and locating new sources, I search for them in my library’s catalog or on WorldCat.  Zotero automatically interprets the information from these sites and puts a little book icon in the address bar.  If I want to add the resource to my collection (complete with bibliographic information), I just click the book.  Try that with your index cards.

Sure, you need to check your data before inserting your footnotes and bibliography.  But this method is lightyears beyond handling these by hand.  Now all we need is the artificial intelligence research assistant from Snow Crash.