Karin Dalziel

Presented at the University of Nebraska-Omaha to the History Department, February 19, 2008.

What is Zotero?

Zotero is a citation management program, similar to RefWorks or EndNote. One of the biggest differences is that Zotero lets you store electronic resources in addition to citations- not just PDF’s, but HTML pages as well. Zotero was created by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Zotero is a plug in for Firefox, an open source web browser. Zotero builds on the already useful Firefox to create a new application.

Advantages of Zotero:

Keep things in electronic form
Searchable PDF’s and electronic resources
Highlight and annotate HTML Pages
Free!

How Does it Work?

Use of Zotero is fairly straightforward: Once installed, a Zotero icon appears in the lower right side of your Firefox screen. Alternately, you can use the keyboard shortcut Control+Alt+Z to bring Zotero up.

When Zotero detects a resource on the web (see a list of supported resources) an icon appears in the upper right side of the address bar. Click the icon, and the citation will save to your Zotero database. If a folder appears, a list of resources has been found- you can click the folder and choose which resources to add to your list.

Why are some sites supported and some aren’t?

Zotero gets information from metadata embedded in web pages, and not all sources have that metadata. Alternately, some sites are supported through a script that pulls information from an HTML page- but this process is fragile. If the page changes, the import won’t work anymore.

Import

To import citations, you have several options:

If there is an item icon on the right hand side of the address bar,you can click that to import the item.
You can export from another citation management program and import into Zotero.
Or, you can manually enter in information.

Annotating and adding notes

You can add notes to all citations- just select the citation and click “notes” in the right side pane. Notes auto save as you type, so there is no need to fear of losing data.

If the resource is a saved HTML page (snapshot), you can also highlight and annotate- simply choose the snapshot and the controls will appear on the upper left side of the window.

Export

You can export Zotero citations into several popular formats. You can then re-import them into another citation management program. One export format, ‘Zotero RDF’ will preserve files and notes as well as citation information. Export is currently the best way to share resources.

What doesn’t work?

Zotero does not have as many citation styles as RefWorks or EndNote- though more are being added all the time.
Right now, there is no easy way of sharing resources, as there is with RefWorks. That functionality will be coming in 2008, though.
Zotero cannot auto capture information from all resources.

Special Features

Build a Bibliography

Zotero makes it easy to build a bibliography- just right click (Control + click for Mac) the items you want to export and choose “Generate Bibliography from selected item.” You can export as HTML or rich text, or copy to clipboard. If you embed your HTML bibliography in a web page, others will be able to automatically import your bibliographic items to Zotero as well.

If the built in bibliography styles are not enough, you can download more from the Zotero site.

Integrate with writing software

Zotero plug ins are available for Word (Mac and Windows) and Open Office (Mac, Windows, Linux). Both versions feature “cite while you write” functionality. You can change citation format whenever needed, and fine tune your citations.

Open Office is a free, open source program anyone can download. It makes a nice alternative to Word, especially for a cash strapped student!

Timeline

The ability to create a timeline of your references is a nice addition to Zotero. You can create a timeline from any collection, and highlight words in the timeline as well. Timeline is powered by MIT’s SIMILE project.

Open Source

While the fact that Zotero is open source isn’t precicely a feature of Zotero, it is important for several reasons:

Open source programs can incorporate code from other open source programs (like the above mentioned timeline code) to enhance and enrich the program. Closed source programs can’t do this, at least not legally.
Open source programs are community supported, which can mean richer features. For instance, translations for Zotero came from the community, so many translations have been created in a fairly short amount of time.
Open source programs generally have an active community of developers and helpers, and Zotero is no exception. If you run into a problem, you can head over to the forums and search for an answer, and if no one else has asked, as yourself. You’ll be surprised at the help you get!

Saved Searches

Saved searches work like smart lists in iTunes and other programs- you set the parameters, and Zotero automatically populates the folder for you. You can use saved searches in conjunction with tags and other metadata to get to your data quickly.

Store files on your computer

Storing your own files can be good or bad, depending on how often you back up. However, having your files on your computer allows you to work off line, and puts you in control of your data. Backup of the Zotero database is easy; it consists of copying the Zotero folder to another drive or burning it to CD.

Languages

Zotero is available in many languages, and there are plans for more. If you would like to see a language not listed, jump in and help out! Since Zotero uses Unicode to store documents, you can save resources in any language.

The Future

There have been several posts lately about the much anticipated sharing feature of Zotero. The Zotero project and the Internet Archive have joined forces to bring many needed features to the scholarly community:

A place for scholars to upload personal archive items. Many scholars have items in their archives that are important and out of copyright. The Zotero/Internet Archive will give people a place to share and find these items, called Zotero Commons.
OCR for scanned documents. Uploading documents to the Internet Archive will automatically apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to pull text from the documents, making them searchable.
Permanent URLs. Scholars will be able to upload to the Internet Archive and get a permanent URL for cited resources.
Share citations. Zotero will not only allow for public uploading of out of copyright or creative commons licensed work, it will allow password protected sharing of resources as well.
Back up and sync Zotero database. Once sharing its possible , it will be possible to backup and sync your Zotero references across computers.

Until then….

Running Zotero from a Portable Drive

It is possible to use one Zotero database on several machines by keeping the database on a USB drive or a networked drive and sharing between computers.

You can also install Zotero on top of a Portable version of Firefox (Windows and Mac) and use it on multiple computers (note that the portable versions are system dependent- that is,the PC version will only run on PC’s, and the Mac version will only run on Macs.)

I have my Zotero database on a USB drive, which I link to from my home and work computers. (Tools>Add ons>Zotero>Advanced) This way I can share the same database between all three. To back up a USB drive, just drag the contents onto another drive.