Tue 16 Nov 2010
“Z,” the mark of Zorro! Boy, do I remember watching that TV show as a kid in Belgium… But no, we’re talking about Zotero here, not the swashbuckling hero of yesteryear.
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.
I was reminded of this app by Phoebe Acheson’s post on the Ancient World Open Bibliographies project blog. I have tried it in the past but it didn’t seem to fit my needs. I know that quite a few people like it though. Acheson (University of Georgia) writes:
I had not used Zotero before this experiment, and I like it reasonably well. But my experimenting thus far has not convinced me that it is a good solution for the need I currently have. As this discussion thread in the forums notes, there is no simple way to create (export) an annotated bibliography, i.e. as a document to print or email and share with students (although work-arounds for specific citations styles, including Chicago, are noted in the discussion.) There are additional user-generated software scripts linked in the thread that provide this functionality as well, and Zotero has an open ticket to make this easier as a pending upgrade (but the ticket is currently 4 years old, so it’s probably a low priority).
If you are using it, what are your thoughts about and experience with Zotero?
November 17th, 2010 at 10:45 am
Hi Francis.
Our experience was that Zotero is great software. However we found it didn’t meet all our needs in terms of managing research documents, so we built http://www.Qiqqa.com. We hope you find it useful too!
Annotated bibliographies is not something it has currently, but the annotation report is an extremely popular.
All the best.
December 1st, 2010 at 9:48 am
I’ve used zotero in my first year digital history class, with the ambition that my students would at least get habituated to the idea of keeping track of what they’ve been reading… details of their ‘zotero assignment’ are here: http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/my-zotero-assigment/
Best,
Shawn
December 21st, 2010 at 8:22 am
Actually doing an annotated bibliography is not that hard. Annotate in the notes sections of the individual bibliographic record, select the items you want to include in your annotated bib, right click on selected items and select create a reports,copy the generated report to word, delete the fields you don’t need, add biblio cite from Zotero. I did a five-item annotated biblio in proper format in less than five minutes. I am used to Zotero, your mileage may vary.