Jason Puckett.net

It must be Zotero week.  Today the CompuMunkey blog reports that you can now import EndNote styles into Zotero!  I gave it a brief test and all seems to work as intended, though as I posted yesterday I’m now using the beta of Zotero 1.5 for its new sync feature, so I’m not sure if this works under version 1.0.6.

This has been one of the few points that Zotero has had to concede to EndNote — Zotero ships with a handful of styles, and EndNote ships with, what, 2500?  Good news indeed.

Zotero has just released its public beta of Zotero Sync, allowing you to maintain your Zotero library on multiple computers.  This is a feature I’ve really been waiting for, and it’s a precursor to the forthcoming Zotero Server providing online storage of references.

Read the documentation at that link — there are warnings about changes to library formats and such that are worth paying attention to before proceeding.

I haven’t tried it out myself yet, but will post my impressions after I’ve worked with it for a bit.

Zotero Sync preview

Small update: I got an error message when I tried to update my database to the new version.  I worked around it by exporting my library, deleting everything in my Zotero directory (after zipping up a backup copy, of course), restarting Firefox and importing my library again.

A while back I got an e-mail from Twitter: “zotero is now following you on Twitter.”

Cool! They (he? she? does Zotero have a gender? It writes about itself in the first person) must have found me via my Zotero workshop outline, which I had sent to them. They (I’ll stick to “they” until I learn otherwise) don’t update very often, but maybe if they had more followers they would. It’d be a great low-key way to drop news and updates about the application.

I just posted my teaching outline for my new Zotero workshop.  Consider it CC-licensed, and please let me know if you find it useful.  I’d be particularly glad to get feedback from Zotero users or instructors.

By chance, yesterday’s maiden voyage for this class ended up being a small group of my library colleagues, which was a great beta test.  They grilled me pretty thoroughly, and thought of many questions I hadn’t considered!  It was a very useful way to try out a new class, and if possible I’m going to try to  arrange a similar test run for future workshops.  I’m thinking if I just sent an e-mail to my team (30 or so librarians) saying I’m offering it as a training session, I’d get a good turnout.

That’s one more thing crossed off the spring semester to-do list, which feels really really good.

I just posted a guide to Zotero:

http://web.library.emory.edu/r_guides/how_guides/zotero.html

I’ll be teaching Zotero workshops starting in a couple of weeks.

I made all my screenshots using the GIMP instead of going over to the media center and using Photoshop.  I’m a big open source software fan, but I find the GIMP just plain awkward to use.  Is that because I’m so used to Photoshop, or is it inherently kinda clunky?

Zotero swag

Zotero’s campus rep sent me some swag for teaching Zotero workshops this semester. Stickers, flyers and a t-shirt.

When I showed my friend Rachel the t-shirt, she said “Wow, Jason, I didn’t think you could get any nerdier, but you have a 3×5 card on your shirt.”