Comments on: Archival Zotero-fication, or Possibly Vice Versa

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 05:25:45 +0000

Zotero already integrates with JSTOR (including full-text indexing of its PDFs). What else would you like to see happen between Zotero and JSTOR?

By: Geschichte Grad

Geschichte Grad — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 01:40:09 +0000

I’ve been slowly adopting Zotero over the past few months—for reading notes and for research organization. It works well for these purposes, but I’ve never even thought of using it to share materials. An interesting idea. Still, I’m just hoping for some formatting options (tweaking the style guide and adjusting the formats of reports, specifically) in the next version.

By: Corey

Corey — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:39:35 +0000

When I started grad school last year, I didn’t know about Endnote or Zotero. I saw fliers sitting around the Writing Center for Zotero, but when I went to the computing services webpage, they instructions for downloading free Endnote software (as did the library website).

This strikes me as odd now since I attend George Mason, who’s Center for History and New Media developed Zotero. As soon as I realized we had put it together I uninstalled Endnote (which was out-of-date anyway). Works great.

By: bemused

bemused — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:44:08 +0000

“I was reluctant to use zotero; it is tied to a browser instance (and thus a particular machine; I use a lot of computers), it’s a bit clumsy.” Not clear what this means. Firefox is available on all major platforms, and the place you establish your saved information is within the Firefox profile which can be located on a USB stick or other portable storage medium.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 02:21:46 +0000

Side note. For those all you Netscape fans Zotero works with Navigator 9. (http://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-on-netscape-navigator-and-flock/)

By: David Mackinder

David Mackinder — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:15:35 +0000

‘the really deciding factor is that I still use Netscape, which is proving less rational or defensible all the time. Shifting over entirely to Firefox (of which Zotero is a plug-in) seems like a good resolution for the new year’: but Zotero works fine with Netscape Navigator 9

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:24:01 +0000

I’ve recently switched to Zotero and I’m hooked. For me, frustrated as I was with Endnote’s clumsy UI, Zotero really makes the day. It seamlessly integrates into my browsing experience. And for my offline resources, it allows me to grab references directly from Google Scholar or CSA (including abstracts!).

On the matter at hand, I don’t think that this particular development will make much of a difference. Sources that are in the public domain (effectively, sources that are +80 years old or so) quite simply form the minority of sources most academics want to cite. Free OCR service is nice, but I wonder whether this will work without human intervention (and if not, how they’re going to pay for that). Remember that the succes rate of OCR is still somewhere between 95-99 percent, which is 1 error per two lines at least. And for older sources (Fraktur!) this will be even worse.

PS You’re on WordPress — have you considered making your blog Zotero-friendly?

By: Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:21:38 +0000

Ironically, JSTOR was started by Mellon.

By: Erik Hetzner

Erik Hetzner — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:49:25 +0000

I was reluctant to use zotero; it is tied to a browser instance (and thus a particular machine; I use a lot of computers), it’s a bit clumsy.

But I realized that it has the feature of snapshotting web pages. This sold me.

Ideally, of course, we would all use the archive.org version of a page, or some other long-lived archive. But, until archive.org crawls a page, the snapshot is a great tool. It means that you won’t lose the text that you want to keep, and it means being able to search the full text of that document.