Librarian X

"Protecting my money maker" by jonlesser (not me)

This is a quick post about some tidbits I learned today from one of the Zotero developers. She was able to share with me some of the development plans for the coming year or so:

1. Zotero API to give it interactivity with webapps. (I’m thinking I’d love to be able to save items into Zotero and have them appear in a formatted bibliography in a Libguide. I hope something like that will be possible.) This will start with a bridge between Zotero and the Center for History and New Media’s open source web publishing project Omeka.

2. A web-based client, which would do two things: Make the Firefox add-in optional, and allow Zotero use from other browsers!

3. Zotero Commons, a drag-and-drop interface to a scholarly repository hosted by the Internet Archive. I know the least about this one. A friend has already asked me about how they’ll address copyright, to which I answer “I have no idea.”

The February 2010 issue of College and Research Library News includes my article  “Superpower your browser with LibX and Zotero: Open source tools for research.” It’s an overview of these two research tools and my ideas about how and why they’re valuable resources for academic libraries. If you’re interested in my March 23 ACRL webcast, this article gives you a good idea of the kind of thing I’ll be covering, but of course with live demos and discussion.

Superpower your browser with LibX and Zotero: Open source tools for research via C&RL News

I’m teaching a webcast for ACRL: “Superpower Your Browser: Open Source Research Tools.” I’ll cover the search and discovery tool LibX and the citation and bibliography tool Zotero. Learn the essentials of both programs, ideas for supporting them at your library, and a little about how open source is good for libraries and library users.

The session is March 23 at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern. More details and registration info on the ACRL site.

If you saw the Chronicle of Higher Ed article this week about Mellon closing its Research in IT grant program, you may have been concerned (as I was) about its impact on Zotero. This grant was a major contributor to Zotero’s funding.

Happily, Dan Cohen reports that Zotero and the Center for History and New Media is in no danger of folding, and has diverse enough funding to continue actively. It sounds like they have ambitious plans for new projects in the future. Whew!

Maybe I’m the last one to discover this feature, but at some point Zotero 2.0 (beta, but I’ve been using it for months with no problems) added a really neat trick.

Click the magic wand button, “Add by identifier.” You’ll get a dialog box prompting you to enter an ISBN, DOI or PMID number. Zotero will grab the citation info online and save it to your library.

Handy shortcut if you’ve got a physical book in front of you and want to save a trip to Worldcat. I just added instructions to my Zotero guide.

A colleague and I are presenting a Zotero workshop in a couple of weeks for faculty and grad students in the college of business. We’re hoping it will be the first of several sessions, so we came up with “research power tools” as the theme. Our library’s graphic designer Christian Steinmetz came up with this amazing promotional poster for the workshop, which I had to share. I love the robot guy for some reason.

(Click the image to embiggen.)

Image used by permission of GSU library

Zotero 2.0 beta is out! With this version Zotero becomes social software, adding the long-awaited groups feature to share references online. This looks very cool.

For more details, check out the Zotero blog or the 2.0 beta release notes.

Dan Cohen of the Zotero project reports that Zotero groups are presently in testing and will be available “very soon,” possibly even as soon as next week.

Presumably this will mean the ability to share references via the profile/follow feature on the Zotero site.  I’m pretty excited in a geeky way.

So without my planning on it, this has been a podcast-intensive week.

At work, I posted the first episode of the GSU Library Insider podcast for students, about EndNote and Zotero (since it’s the end of the school year and students are furiously writing papers).  (Episodes, RSS Feed)

On my own time, I’m pleased to debut the Adventures in Library Instruction podcast, co-produced with my friends Anna Van Scoyoc of New Jersey PL and Rachel Borchardt of American U.  This will be a monthly thing, and we’re hoping to get other people involved in future episodes.  (Episodes, RSS Feed)

Update: I was also on T is for Training! I promise to stop podcasting now.

 

 Adventures in Library Instruction episode 1: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 GSU Library Insider podcast episode 1 (EndNote and Zotero): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Zotero rolled out new versions of the stable and beta releases this week.  I had a bit of a glitch getting the sync function to work with this beta version, but a little digging through the Zotero forums fixed that.

More interesting is the fact that they’ve added online user profiles.  If you set up an account on the Zotero site (reserve your name!), you can suddenly upload a user picture, follow other users, and optionally make your entire library visible if you’re syncing with the Zotero server.

I hope this means that we might expect to see recommendations and citation sharing soon.  I’m looking forward to Amazon-style “researchers who liked this article also liked….”