Zotero

Back to a post about a session at the AULIC seminar in Bath on Monday. Zotero was a presentation by Joe Bennett, who teaches in the School of Music and Performing Arts at Bath Spa University and is also doing a PhD at Surrey University. Zotero enables you to manage your references and articles, is free, and is a browser addon for Firefox and a MS Word plug-in, to enable you to integrate it into your work practice.
Joe went through his requirement for a bibliographic/literature management package. This included ability to bookmark and archive web pages with correct citation; cloud-based storage of pdfs & capability to full text search (as his experience was that people didn’t usually get an article and read it all the way through, but rather search for particular things within them); no login/authentication to slow down study process; drag and drop compatibility with Google docs; extracting metadata from full text. He identified that Zotero met these requirements better than Refworks or Endnote and is free up to 100 MB storage (he pays a smallish subscription to have a much larger storage area; making it a “Freemium” (Free/ premium) business model). There was discussion about copyright issues (Joe stressed that this ability to store and search pdfs was really important to him and other researchers, and also said that whilst others could see and search his citations, he did not open up access to the protected material itself)
Joe has a blog Web 2.0 tools in teaching and learning at http://bathspaweb2.edublogs.org and this is the post specifically about Zotero
http://bathspaweb2.edublogs.org/2010/02/05/dropbox-and-zotero/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Carfax Hotel, Bath, June 2010