Jane Hart's Top 100 Tools for Learning 2013

Jane Hart recently released "The Top 100 Tools for Learning 2013." Hart has been accumulating and evaluating teaching tools for quite a few years now, so it's helpful both to observe the trends and to discover what's new and possible. Click through the slideshare she has provided.

My comments/observations on some of the items... (Links can be found on the slideshare unless otherwise included.) 

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2013 from Jane Hart

• I have seen how Twitter can be helpful, but I just have not found it compelling to use very often.
• Google Drive/Docs has become a very important tool in my teaching. We use Moodlerooms for our class management system, but for collaborative work, Google Docs still works best for me.
• YouTube and PowerPoint: Until we're ready to step up considerably with our video production and hosting, I have found that for most of my online 'presentations,' what I've ended up doing is narrating/recording my PowerPoints. This internal PowerPoint feature became available in Office 2010 and generated huge WMV files. It is somewhat improved in Office 365 which generates MP4 files. The files are still quite large, so the best way to share them is to upload them to YouTube and then share a private YouTube link. (Note that you need to request a free educational YouTube account to upload large files.)
• Dropbox: I use this as one of my cloud backup systems, but I've had much better experience with SugarSync. You get 5GB free instead of Dropbox's 2GB, and I find it easier to manage the folders that I sync. (Signing up with this link gets you and me an extra 500MB storage. Thanks!)
• Facebook and Google+/Hangouts: I've been using it to set up private groups. Since most students are already on FB, it works pretty well. I'd like to move to Google+, and it has been helpful for more school business interaction rather than social. I also would like to use Hangouts more, but there is a lot of inertia with others about moving away from Skype.
• LinkedIn: It still seems to me that people are afraid not to be on LinkedIn rather than finding it so great to be in it.
• Prezi: It's not just a trendy alternative to PowerPoint. I have had some students do some really excellent presentations with it.
• Feedly: With the demise of GoogleReader, I went to Feedly, and it's been fine.
• Diigo: I use it, and I like it, but it's hard getting my students to use it. It really is a great way to share links and information.
• Jing, Camtasia, Snagit...: I have a very old version of Camtasia that is still helpful, but for easy and free screen video capture, I have my students use Jing. For screen captures, a really outstanding free and open source program I highly recommend is Greenshot. It has a variety of capture options, a handy editor for quick annotating of the capture, and a variety of save and share options. If you've read this far, learning about Greenshot is the payoff!
• Voicethread: I keep suggesting that my students try it to illustrate a biblical narrative...
• Adobe Photoshop and other photography stuff: For the photographs I've taken in Israel/Jordan/Palestine/Turkey/Greece, I primarily use Lightroom. It's great. If I need to do more elaborate touchup, I use Photoshop Elements which is more than enough for me. For a free but still quite robust alternative that I regularly use for quick viewing and touchup, I use Faststone Image Viewer. For sharing photos online, I can use Lightroom to create an attractive viewer on my own server, or I send photos to SugarSync if I want to share and make them easily downloadable, or I send them to Flickr (which has really improved) or to my Google+ since it's so well connected with my smartphone.
• SurveyMonkey: A great way to make quick surveys for my classes. The seminary got a commercial license, and it is now what we use for all our course evaluations.
• Google Maps and Google Earth: I recently blogged about these and clicking on the links will bring you to the posts with exercises showing ways to use these resources for biblical geography.
• I mentioned it last year, and I'll mention it again. The really significant omission on the list is Zotero. I have come to use this nearly daily as a way to organize books, articles, PDFs, and web pages I come across. It's such an outstanding bibliographic tool. I did buy the Scanner for Zotero app for my smartphone, so I'm prepared for Society of Biblical Literature meeting this year. Zotero also allows for collaboration with the sharing of libraries, so it's one way I share my bibliographies with my students and allow them to add to it. (There are Zotero mobile apps for other platforms too.)
  
  

Zotero 2

Zotero 2 (a stable beta, at least) has been released, and you will want to check out some of the highlights noted on Dan Cohen's blog. To highlight just a few things:

• The syncing of collections works great and is done automatically on the Zotero server. This means that you any additions or changes you make on one computer will be reflected on another one you use. It also means that you can access your library data from any computer by logging in to Zotero and checking your library on that web site.
• You can create your own free account and then complete a profile to make yourself visible to other Zotero users. As of today, 156 users list themselves as working in the "Religion" discipline. You can search for other labels. E.g., I find 16 users associated with "seminary." This works a bit like Academia.edu as a way of finding others with similar interests, but Academia.edu has done more for organizing by schools and/or disciplines.
• Perhaps more interesting is the Group colloboration to create library collections. There aren't too many at this time, but as an example, I started a "Parables of Jesus" group. You can view the bibliography of books I've started to organize here. You can also join the group (if you are logged in to Zotero), and then the resources will show up in the Zotero frame in your own collections. I have set this group up so that others can add resources to it. This looks to be a very promising way to build collections that appears to be more group-friendly than some of the other library management tools.
  

In any case, check out the updates and let us know what other ways you are using Zotero.
From the comments: check out additional info at nerdlets.

Stuff for the Mac

I'm a PC kind of guy, but I'm trying to stay aware of what's going on in the Mac world as it relates to tools useful for biblical studies. Today I defer to someone who actually knows what they are doing with a Mac. Check out this post on My Favorite Mac Software by Susan Pigott, an OT professor. She doesn't mention any Bible software, but she does describe a number of programs related to library management and word processing. Especially note the Bookpedia program she describes. I've posted quite a few times about library management stuff. I'm using Zotero mostly, but the Libra program (free, but now orphaned apparently without further plans for development) lets me easily post some of my collections. (E.g., some of my books on the parables or my music collection [the cheesy stuff is my wife's, and I haven't included my fine collection of LPs yet...])

Online Book Searches

In the previous post I took a look at a few search engines and what they might do. One of the comments asked about how one gets the searches into the Firefox search box. Check out OpenSearchFox I describe here.
That works pretty well except when I am trying to find texts of books online. So here's my opportunity to share the resources I use. Specifically, I'm not looking just for the book but for the text of the book. Usually this is going to mean free, public domain texts.
Using Searchme, I've pulled together the 7 sites I use.

Searchme

Maximize stack view

It might be easier to work from this Online Book Search page I created that includes all those sites on a single page.
Some things to note:

• Each of these repositories of books is different. If you don't find the book you want in one, try another.
• Each site is worth checking for the various options it offers. Create your own Google library. Books in the Internet Archive are available as TXT, PDF, B/W PDF, online Flip Book, or in DjVu format. ManyBooks focuses on etexts for mobile devices including the Kindle, but many texts also are available as PDFs. With TynCat, the results page is usually just the starting point leading you into libraries. The Universal Digital Library is somewhat newer and is mainly designed for online reading. The Open Library has a nice collection. When it says you can read a text online, note that there will be a "Print" option for downloading the book as PDF or DjVu. WorldCat is designed to point you to libraries where the book may be found near you (after you enter your postal code), so it isn't really intended for downloads. It has a great way for getting accurate reference citations.
• Don't forget the "Search Inside" feature of many books listed on Amazon. TynCat will help you find such books.

I've done a bunch of stuff on library management, but let me know if I'm missing something good.

Library Management Made Easy

With thanks to Cynthia F, I now have a CueCat, one of those nifty little barcode scanners that a dozen years or so ago were given away for free so that a person could scan coupons in magazine ads. If you have a large library of books that you want to catalog, you may want to get yourself one of these little gadgets. Using the CueCat, I am now able simply to scan the barcode/ISBN code on a book, and it automatically is entered into my library with most of the bibliographic info included. It really is that simple: just wave it back a forth a few times, and it reads the barcode, converts it, and searches for the book. Okay, now that I have your attention, here are the qualifications...
I've highlighted library management tools before (here and here: LibraryThing, Shelfari, Zotero, Endnote, ShelfServant, and others), but there are only a few programs for which this CueCat scanning trick will work (and unfortunately, Zotero is not one of them):

• For Linux, try Tellico or Alexandria. Both are free.
• For Macs, try Delicious Library 2. (You will need to modify the CueCat slightly.) Cost is $40.

For PCs, you have a couple options.

• LibraryThing is a neat online option. It's free for up to 200 books and only $25 for a lifetime unlimited collection. It has a community commentary component to it, and it can generate a bibliographic reference for a book using OttoBib. It can also export your whole library to an Excel file. A couple drawbacks: it really isn't intended to be a research/footnoting resource, it only handles books, and it stores your data online.

• Here's the new one I discovered: Libra. It's free. It's graphically attractive. (It looks similar to Shelfari. Cf. the graphic above.). It's a small download that runs locally. You can use it to catalog books, DVDs, games, and music CDs. You might not even need a CueCat, since the website claims that you can simply use your webcam to scan in the barcodes. (I was able to make it work for books using the CueCat. I couldn't make it work on CDs, and I couldn't get it to work with my webcam at all.) It has an easy way to check books in/out to friends. You can export your libraries to Excel files and to attractive HTML pages (eg). It does have some drawbacks. Like LibraryThing, it's mainly a book cataloger, not a research tool, though you can add description details in addition to what it pulls from Amazon. It pulls a bunch of bibliographic info, but it can't sort by author's last name. The other drawback is that it appears that it may be an orphaned or at least a temporarily abandoned program. In any case, it works as is and is free and does a great job with the CueCat for books.
  

Psyched to get your own CueCat? LibraryThing sells them for $15 shipped, but you can also find them on eBay.

Zotero Sync Preview Available!

Dan Cohen has announced on his blog the release of Zotero 1.5 with Sync Preview. This is really welcome news. What it means is that you can now use the Zotero servers to keep your Zotero bibliographies synchronized with multiple computers. Here is the Zotero announcement which highlights the following:

We are excited to announce the launch of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview, which introduces a powerful slate of new features, including:

• Automatic synchronization of collections among multiple computers. For example, sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at home.
  
• Free automatic backup of your library data on Zotero’s servers.
  
• Support for thousands of existing Endnote® export styles. While the CSL styles utilized by Zotero are a much more robust and powerful long-term solution for styling references, we are happy to offer users the ability to use Endnote styles where there are currently no available CSLs.
  
• A new style manager allowing you to add and delete CSLs and legacy style formats.
  
• Preliminary support for local sharing of collections through ZeroConf on OS X. Other platforms and full support to come with the final release of Zotero 1.5.
  

Some things to note:

• You must be using Firefox 3. Part of the reason for the Zotero delay was waiting for Firefox 3.
  
• This is an initial preview version with some known issues. Be sure to follow the directions on the Zotero page for backing up your Zotero data before installing this version. (Note:
  they basically want you to create a new Firefox profile for testing purposes. If you know what you are doing and are willing to take a little risk, you can simply backup your Zotero data. If you should run into a problem, you would need to restore the sqlite file and the folders & data in the storage subdirectory.)
• Note that are still a few limitations and known issues, most notably, annotations, highlights, snapshots, and file links are not synced. To keep annotations and such synced, they recommend that you continue to use a file synchronization tool.
• You do have to set up a Zotero account. It's free.
• What basically happens is that with Zotero running, click on the little 'gear' icon and select Preferences. You will see a new Sync tab, and here you enter your Zotero user/password.
• You will repeat the process on a second computer. Note that syncing occurs automatically, but if you want to force a sync, look for the little green 'sync' button on the top right of the Zotero bar.
  

I have given it a spin, and I can report that it works great!

Evernote 3.0

I've previously mentioned Microsoft's OneNote as a catchall, note-taking tool (especially in making notes on Bible readings), but if you are looking for a free alternative, consider Evernote.
Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.
That is, you can capture text, images, web pages, photos from your cell phone or other camera, and then have the items analyzed for text, and then indexed, and then available on a web account. Here's there overview video:

Available for Windows XP/Vista/Mobile and Mac. There is a FREE 40Mb version, and a more robust $45/year version.
HT: Webware

Shelfari - Create your own bookshelf

If you want to set up your own bookshelf, I've previously listed some library management tools here, including the useful LibraryThing. Another more visually appealing option which is also a kind of social bookmarking and recommendation service is Shelfari. You will have to add your books manually, but you can click them in quickly via an Amazon search. Like LibraryThing, joining is free, but it appears that you can add as many books as you want. Once you have added books to your shelf, you can provide tags and reviews. You can also move them around the bookshelf. I'm not quite sure I'm ready to add my whole library... (I'm still trying to find my old CueCat scanner which I supposedly can use to scan in books more quickly.)

Zoomii - Visually browsing in Amazon for books

Miss that real bookstore ambiance? The random book discovery that happens when you were looking for something else? The visual appeal of the book covers?

Except for actually handling the books (no little cafe either; bring your own drink...), Zoomii recreates something of that kind of experience for Amazon. You can move around by categories, and then you can zoom in/out to check the shelves. (Use the onscreen keys or your wheel mouse.) Clicking on the book will bring you more detail, and from there you can buy it, add it to your Amazon Wish List (after signing in), or go to the Amazon page.
I've given a little screen shot of the Religion section, and you can see that it is organized alphabetically by author like in a bookstore. Rendering is a bit slow (apparently in Firefox3), but not really a problem. You can perform searches, but don't expect to find every Amazon book. (I'm not sure what filters are used to return the limited results shown.) There is still the link to perform the same search on Amazon. (E.g., searching for "bible atlas" on Zoomii gave me 8 results. Clicking through to the same search on Amazon gave me 1531.)

For more info, watch this video:

Links: Zoomi Books blog

Annotating, bibliography, and citation

Picking up some loose ends, especially responding to some recent posts by Danny Zacharias at Deinde.

Annotating: In this post, Zacharias recommends using A.nnotate as an online collaboration tool. I checked it out. Looks good, but the free version does limit you to the number of docs and editors. Services like this are competing with GoogleDocs and the new Adobe Acrobat online and such. Τhe primary virtues of A.nnotate compared to the rest are that it can import PDF files (something even the Adobe site can't do!) and that it can handle Greek/Hebrew Unicode. I have used co-ment, and it too can deal with Greek/Hebrew, and I also like that it can be set to provide a feed for changed texts. A.nnotate can also make notes on web pages, but it basically is taking a snapshot of the page and then leaving notes. For web page annotation, I've used diigo. It's pretty quick and versatile. For more web annotation tools check HERE and HERE. Check HERE for info on using Google Reader for web page annotation.

Bibliography Tools: On this post, Zacharias recommends Biblioscape as an alternative bibliography and research manager for those who don't have NotaBene with it powerful Ibidem and Orbis programs. Biblioscape does look good, includes a number of nice extra features, works well with MSWord, etc.... but it costs $200. I think Zotero is accomplishing all I need for free.

Citation: On this post, Zacharias laments the lack of professional disregard for electronic texts, and the outdated and insufficient way we have for citing such texts. Yes! It's a post worth reading, and I support his suggestions for new footnoting and bibliography formats, especially for electronic editions. The question of appropriately citing texts regularly arises on the BibleWorks forum. Logos has its built-in footnote system which works great when copy/pasting text, but it still needs some additional tweaking to locate specific points in the electronic text. Zacharias is correct here, I think, in arguing that citation systems simply need to allow someone to find the referenced text and that there should be consistency in how texts are referenced.

Research and Note-taking Tools

A person on the BibleWorks forum asked what others were doing to take and organize notes as they did research. The person was hoping to do so within the BW7 editor. This would certainly work, but, as the person noted, it would take some forethought about directory structure in order to organize the notes efficiently. There is an effective "Find" feature in BW7 that would allow for later searching. One can also set up notes within Logos, of course, and you can work with those notes more easily by grabbing the free DomiNotez "note enhancer for Libronix."

It is great to have all your Bible-related notes in a single place, but neither of the note taking editors in BW7 or Logos (or any other Bible software program) are well suited for collecting research notes on books or articles. So what else is available? I have previously blogged about bibliographic tools (here and here), but we are interested more here in research and note-taking tools.

My two favorite tools are 1) the combination of Orbis (a free-form text-retrieval system) and Ibidem (the bibliographic database) with NotaBene and 2) Zotero.

Orbis is outstanding and is well structured in connecting notes to their origins and also quite versatile in composing free-standing notes. It basically is creating a textual database with sophisticated search functions. The drawbacks: it will cost you somewhere around $200-400, and it will take a commitment (but potentially a very worthwhile one)to learn how to use NotaBene.

Zotero continues to expand its capabilities, and it is free. Using the Vertov plugin, Zotero can even be used to annotate a wide range of media. I have also noted how to keep Zotero synced across any number of computers using FolderShare. Zotero works great for inserting end/footnotes and for generating bibliographies in MSWord and OpenOffice, and you can even download an addin that formats everything according to the SBL stylesheet. (Read about it here and my observation that it was having trouble adding page numbers. If you install the Zotero Development XPI, it works just fine. This is a one-click installation, so it is easy to do, but note that there are some language restrictions.) The drawbacks: you need to be using Firefox, and there is a little extra work to keep it synced across multiple computers.

So, Zotero is great as a bibliographic tool, but what about its use as a research and note taking tool? Take a look at the graphic below. (Click to expand.)

Books can easily be added through a site like Amazon with all their bibliographic information included. Web articles or pages are easy to add, and one can also add standalone notes. Once the items have been added to your library, you then have multiple ways of organizing and annotating them. You can create Collections to organize the items, and items can be dragged/dropped into multiple collections or subcollections. You can add a note to it or attach any other resource, either online or one located on your computer. You can also add tags which will prove to be useful later in searching. You can also link the item to related items in your library. When it comes to finding / retrieving the info you want, note that you can click on one of your collections and see just those items. You can search using the tags you have applied. You can also use the search box to search your items. Note that this search also includes the full text on the web pages you have in your library! If that isn't enough, there is also an advanced search that uses Boolean operators and searches on any field you choose. It is a pretty amazing tool...

Bottom line: If you are using NotaBene, Orbis and Ibidem are the way to go. Everyone else should really look at Zotero.

I have a couple of bonus options for you in my next post!

Zotero and Internet Archive

Here is a posting from a few weeks ago announcing a major alliance between the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive. (I have posted previously on my appreciation for Zotero.) You will want to read the full announcement for more details, but here is a summary of the five main points.

1. Exposing and Sharing the "Hidden Archive" - The alliance hopes to create a "Zotero Commons" for scholars to share documents and other resources.
2. Searching the Personal Library - The idea is to let scholars submit documents (which will be returned) which will be scanned and digitized using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The contributor gets a digitized version which is shared with all.
3. Enabling Networked References and Annotations - The goal here is to provide a stable edition of an online resource for future, shared referencing. Using the Zotero annotation tools, it will also be possible for colloborative sharing of annotations.
4. Simplifying Colloborative Sharing - Groups of scholars can create private commons for sharing documents and annotations.
5. Facilitating Scholarly Discovery - The hope is that the libraries created by Zotero users along with the Internet Archive collection can be shared by scholars in facilitating discovery of resources.

manybooks.net - Another free ebook site

I just found another site that allows for downloading of free books: manybooks.net. There are almost 20,000 volumes available which really isn't that many. I ran a search on terms likes Bible, Greek, Hebrew, Gospels, Galatians, and there are no books that you won't find on the other sites. (See this listing of such sites.) What is unique about this site is the variety of formats available for each book, including Kindle, iPhone, iSilo, eReader, and Plucker, in addition to more usual PDF, DOC, RTF, HTML, etc. (See the list at right.)

Bibliographic and Research Tools - Summary

I've more thoroughly summarized some of these resources here.
Bibliographic Tools (organizing bibliographic data and exporting for use in footnotes and bibliographies)

• Zotero - The Next-Generation Research Tool (only works with Firefox, but this is my favorite apart from NotaBene's Orbis and Ibidem)
• SBLHS Apparatus Builder is designed to produce apparatus (that’s citation footnotes and bibliography) for publications conforming to the Society for Biblical Literature's SBL Handbook of Style: For Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Early Christian Studies. It is currently ready to use in beta test. It also includes integration with Ibidem, the bibliographic management tool of Nota Bene.
• LibraryThing
• Amazon.com Your Media Library
• ShelfServant.com
• OttoBib - Free Automatic Bibliography Generator. Fast! MLA, APA, Chicago, Turabian
• Google Notebook for IE7 or Firefox
• For NotaBene users, Ibidem is a complete solution. When used with their Archiva program, it also becomes a tool for incorporating data from the Internet.
• Remote Library Search in Logos: This really is a remarkable part of Logos that often goes unnoticed. (Access within Logos by using File > New > Remote Library Search.) It searches quite a few national and theological libraries. Results can be exported in a variety of formats (MLA, CMS, Turabian, SBL, etc.)Logos also provides a Remote Library Search video to demonstrate how to use it as well as a blog post by Rick Brannan. (This addin is only available in the Scholar's, Silver, and Gold collections and does not appear to be available for purchase separately.)

Research Tools (especially looking for Scripture references in articles)

• Index Theologicus at Tübingen - Biblical scholars should especially note the Scriptural Reference page. It a great help for finding articles on a specific verse.
• Reference Search: Explicit Searches on Implicit References. This new search engine only works to search references to biblical/early Xn/rabbinic texts. (Check out the Reference List of works it is cataloging.) It will not direct to you online versions of those texts. It will find articles that mention that specific text.

Other resources to try:

• Add Search Providers to Internet Explorer 7 or to Firefox (right click on search box)
• Language Resources

Google Language Tools -Resources in 14 languages; can search pages in other languages; provides rough translations for web pages or text

lingro - Includes dictionaries (6 languages, and since it is open content, users can add to the dictionary and also create their own word lists for review), a web viewer, and a file viewer. Works by rendering every word on a page or document as clickable and providing a popup translation of choice.

• Web Annotation: Consider using i-Lighter. It is a free service that allows you to highlight and organize web material. It includes some elements of Zotero and Google Notebook mentioned above.
  
• Data Visualization: Many Eyes (examples)
  
  • NT Persons Co-Occurrences
  • Faith and Political Party in USA

Searching, Reading, and Downloading Online Books - Summary

For more details on some of the following listings as well as links to other resources, check this SBL article and this blog posting.

• Google Book Search - Note that you can choose only those books with "Full View." Such books are downloadable, or, with a Google account, you can add them to your online 'library.' Many books have an "About this book" link that provides considerable additional information.
  • Bible, Judaism, and Christianity via Google Book Search
  • Free Books in Biblical Studies and Related Fields (Google, Archive.org, etc.)
• Microsoft Live Book Search - Similar to Google Books, but different books have been digitized and different copyrights obtained. (E.g., Schweitzer's Quest is available for download here but not on Google.)
• Universal Digital Libary - Over a million books are digitized, and it includes books that are not available in either GoogleBook or Microsoft LiveBook.
• manybooks.net. About 20,000 volumes available which really isn't that many. What is unique about this site is the variety of formats available for each book, including Kindle, iPhone, iSilo, Plucker, in addition to PDF, DOC, RTF, HTML, etc.
• Google Scholar and Microsoft Live Search Academic: Another pair of search engines that look in journal articles, dissertations, and books.
• Tyndale House Library Catalogue
• Internet Archive: Actually two places to search: Internet Archive Texts and The Open Library
  
• Amazon's Search Inside feature: If you search on Amazon for keywords, it not only looks at titles, but it also look inside books. This only applies to some books which have the "Search Inside" feature indicating that the books have been scanned.
• Book Burro - A Firefox addin that searches WorldCat for nearby books as well as cheapest online prices.

Online Library and Research Resources

I've posted before (here and here) on online library and research tools, and there are a couple new items I can add to the list.

• lingro - This new site includes dictionaries for English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Polish (and since it is open content, users can add to the dictionary and also create their own word lists for review), a web viewer, and a file viewer (using your own .txt, .pdf, or.doc files). It works by rendering every word on a page or document as clickable and providing a popup translation of choice. (It is similar to what you can do with the Greek texts on Re:Greek=zhubert.) Google Language Tools provides other ways to deal with translation and includes 14 languages, but this lingra provides a great integration and customizability of resources. For a fuller review of lingra's advantages, check this blog review.
• The Universal Digital Library - This is a new digital collection that includes books that are not available in either GoogleBook or Microsoft LiveBook. (E.g., Robinson's 1915 Paradigms and Exercises in Syriac Grammar is only available here.) There are more than a 1.5 million books now digitized, and it reflects more of a global collection with many books in Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Urdu, etc. For some perspective, there are 2608 English language books in "Religion," 687 returns for "Bible," 527 for "Greek," and 114 for "Hebrew." For books still under copyright, viewing is limited to 20%, but most books are by far older ones. Books are stored in a variety of formats: some are HTML, some are TIFF (a TIFF plugin can be installed, but on my system, QuickTime properly rendered the documents), and some are in DjVu which requires a free, downloadable plugin. For more information, read this article.
  

For ease of referencing/bookmarking, I will publish two summary posts which bring together the resources for online books and for doing research.

New library management tool

I have previously posted about library management tools, and John Kendall has just pointed me to Steffen Jenkins site where he is providing a free, java-based, apparatus builder based on the SBL Handbook of Style. It also integrates with Nota Bene's Ibidem. It is in beta for now, but it works quite well and offers excellent ways of simplifying bibliographic entry, linking to other resources, and generating footnotes and bibliographies according to the SBL guidelines. It is worth checking out.
BTW, while you are on his page, you will see that he also provides "Yet Another Vocab Tester designed to aid the learning of vocab and grammar, especially for Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek."
Both are fully Unicode compliant.