Zotero course online July 2011
I'm teaching a month-long continuing ed class on Zotero for Simmons College's School of Library and Information Science. This is an asynchronous class that starts July 1 and runs through the whole month of July. The class is for librarians and library staff who want to learn to use Zotero for their own research and teach and support it in their libraries.
You don't need any previous experience with Zotero to participate. We start with installation and setup, cover the basic save and cite features, group libraries and cloud storage, best practices for teaching and supporting Zotero in libraries, practical applications for Zotero in your library, and more.
I use my forthcoming (soon!) book about Zotero as the "textbook" for the class, so as an added bonus you'll basically get a free electronic copy of the book's content as part of your participation. (I don't think the official ebook edition will be available in time, so I'll probably be using preprint chapters. But all the words and pictures are the same.)
This is the second time I've taught this class; I think I got some good ideas from my experiences with the March run and I'm really pleased that Simmons' continuing education office has asked me to bring it back for a repeat engagement.
Register here. The class costs $250, $200 for Simmons GSLIS alumni.
Adventures in Library Instruction episode 26
This month we talked about Lori Reed and Paul Signorelli's new book, Workplace Learning and Leadership: a Handbook for Library and Nonprofit Trainers. Lots of good discussion about training and its relationship to instruction.
Readability and Zotero
Zotero users are probably aware that it doesn't automatically include citation info like dates and author names when saving a citation to a website.
Yesterday, Amy Cavender posted an article to Profhacker explaining how to use the Readability plugin to improve Zotero's ability to save website citations. In a nutshell, clicking the Readability button generates enough metadata for Zotero to pick up the author name (although not perfectly in my screenshot example) and website title, and sometimes date of publication depending on the site -- and it also cleans up the Zotero snapshot, eliminating extraneous ads and graphics.
For more details, read the post:
Use Readability to Make Sites Zotero-Friendly (Profhacker)
ALI episode 25
For our second anniversary of the Adventures in Library Instruction podcast, we teamed up with our old colleague Erin Mooney from Emory U.
LISEvents.com
Great idea from Blake Carver of LISHost -- LISEvents.com is a new crowd-sourced directory of library conferences, workshops, webinars and other events. There's already a lot of stuff listed; add your events!
Bibliography of Zotero book
I've posted the bibliography and chapter titles of my upcoming book on my Zotero page. (Edited to add: Also available in a shared Zotero library.)
No firm release date yet, but we're still expecting it to be available by ALA Annual.
ALI podcast episode 24
Thanks to Anna's editing, this episode went up last night with a few hours of March to spare! We talked about Computers in Libraries 2011, THATcamp Southeast, professional development and technology, and as usual what we're doing with teaching and stuff.
Adventures in Library Instruction podcast episode 24: Geeking Out & Speaking Up
Podcasting presentation at Computers in Libraries
Just a quick note to mention that I'll be co-presenting on "Podcasting for professional development" at Computers in Libraries 2011 in Washington DC next week, with my AdLib Instruction colleague Rachel Borchardt and our counterpart Maurice Coleman from the T is for Training podcast.
We're presenting on the Training and Learning track, session E303 at 1:30 pm on Wednesday, March 23 (we have the second half of the hour).
Zotero book updates
I talked to my editor Kathryn Deiss at ACRL yesterday, and I can say the following things about my upcoming Zotero book with a reasonable amount of confidence:
I'll be rewriting and editing through the end of March and maybe a bit into April.
The book will probably be available for purchase in May or June. We expect it to be on the shelves of the bookstore at ALA Annual.
The cover will be designed by Christian Steinmetz, our library's Creative Manager and (in his spare time) comics creator extraordinaire.
There will be e-book editions available from Amazon (with the usual non-optional Kindle DRM) and directly from ACRL (without DRM), hopefully simultaneous with the print release.
The table of contents consists of:
- Introduction (how I became so invested in using Zotero)
- 1. About Zotero (what it is, a bit about open source software, why I think Zotero rocks)
- 2. Setting up (installing the Firefox and Standalone versions)
- 3. Creating your library (putting stuff into Zotero, organizing and so on)
- 4. Creating bibliographies and writing with Zotero (using Zotero with Word and other word processors, citing and writing and related topics)
- 5. Zotero online (syncing, using group libraries, and using Zotero for collaborative work)
- 6. Teaching Zotero (using Zotero with classes, teaching workshops in person and online, lots of real-world examples)
- 7. Supporting Zotero (Zotero "champions," Zotero outreach on your campus, providing staff training, what your IT staff might need to know)
I'm using the rough draft as a text for my Zotero class for Simmons SLIS this month.
Thanks to everyone who's provided input and suggestions so far. I'll be really excited to see this thing go out into the world this summer.
ALI episode 23
I'm a few days late posting this here, but if you don't subscribe to the Adventures in Library Instruction feed you may want to check out our latest episode. We talked with Iris Jastram about Google Scholar, her "subversive handouts" and more.
My Zotero book
Adventures in Library Instruction podcast
- Episode 35: The Guide on the Side w/ Meredith Farkas
- Episode 34: Discovery Layers in the Classroom
- Episode 33: Love the Cataloger; Hate the Catalog
My posts @GSU Library
I Support
Twittering
- Online Zotero workshop July http://t.co/9MFg75aH