The first upgrade of eGems Collector Pro 2.5 only enhances this creative information manager for your PC desktop. Working with any application using drag/drop or copy/paste features, eGems offers busy students, professionals, and laypeople a tool for saving and organizing text, pictures, links, electronic documents, or web pages for fast and easy retrieval. One especially solid feature of this system is the ability to create automatic bibliographic citations because eGems save the source information of every item it captures.

Once launched, the Gem icon floats on top of open applications waiting for items to be copy/pasted and saved, becoming gems. The gem is automatically given a date, name, original source program from which it was taken, and size of gem data when saved. Gems are sent to an “Unfiled” tray; however, the user can organize and create relationships around the data mined from various sources by adding new chests and trays. An option for editing text or adding descriptive language to captured images, plus the ability to add the author, title, publisher, and date, encourages good research habits. Later, this stored information can be automatically converted to APA, MLA, and Chicago Manual of Style (new addition with this version) citation formats, arguably the best feature of this software.

New to version 2.5 is the ability to share local network access to gem collections in a secure environment, equally valuable to corporate or academic institutions where collaboration is desired. Gearing its precompiled data collections to academic audiences, Gemteq has four free downloadable databases: the U.S. Constitution, New & Old Testaments of the Bible, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Mark Twain’s maxims from The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson.

The Bottom Line: eGems Collector Pro 2.5 is incredibly versatile and easy to use; more importantly, it’s fun! If you have suffered from information overload and an inability to track the great stuff you find on the web, eGems is a dream come true. It should be made available to all students required to write papers or professionals who create research reports. Highly recommended for corporations and all academic institutions and libraries.

-- Holly Stec Dankert, Reference & Instruction, DePaul University Libraries, Chicago.