Introduction to Zotero

The Center for History and New Media has just released Zotero 1.0, a next-generation scholarly research tool that runs in the Firefox web browser. On a very basic level, Zotero stores references and notes (like EndNote or other citation managers). But since it lives in the browser and is web-aware, Zotero is able to provide a number of innovative features, such as the ability to sense, record, and share scholarly metadata on the web. For instance, when you are viewing the web page for a book (e.g., on a library’s website or at Amazon.com) Zotero understands that you are looking at a book and can offer to save its full citation information. Zotero has native support for promising new web technologies, including OpenURL, embedded microformats, RDF, and a variety of XML data-exchange formats. In addition, Zotero has “smart folder” and “smart search” technology and other advanced features such as tagging. The 1.0 release of Zotero is just the beginning of what we believe will be a powerful, open, extensible platform for scholarly research. We plan to provide features to greatly enhance collaboration and autodiscovery — such as the ability to share and collaboratively construct bibliographies and notes, and find new books and articles that might be of interest based on what you’ve already saved to your library (using a server-based recommendation system). And like Firefox itself, other researchers and software developers will be able to expand Zotero with digital tools for visualization, text analysis, document classification, and translation (to name just a few possibilities). We will provide a demonstration and technical overview of the software, and we will explain how various pieces of the Zotero — such as its robust tagging and search capabilities — can be combined with other software (on both the client- and server-side) to create novel forms of research, interpretation, and communication.

http://www.zotero.org

Handout (PDF)