Zotero, Amen!
Cat in the Stack
Word on the street is that something on the order of a quarter million people have tuned in to Zotero, the amazing new online digital organizing, aggregating, and annotating tool that is designed by humanists for everyone, but with the special citation practices and digital needs of contemporary humanists in mind. Even the examples in the tutorial are good, theoretically engaged, connected to contemporary critical practice. Hats off to the great team at George Mason University and to Dan Cohen, Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History and Associate Director and Director of Research Projects, Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He's our hero! Sometimes people complain that no one is interested in so-called "digital humanities." (I wish we could just say "humanities," for pete's sakes; no one would say "digital microbiology" because the biologists were using computers in their work). Well, as Zotero's success and the massive interest in our Digital Media and Learning Competition attest, just about everyone is interested when the projects truly intersect with what it is that drives humanists. David (i.e. David Theo Goldberg, my collaborator on things HASTAC) and I keep saying that the humanities are foundational to the salient issues and implications of the information age and we need tools as visionary as that. Zotero, like the work from the Institute for the Future of the Book, is all that. HASTAC herewith offers its official seal of approval. \*__*/ [for those who haven't read my earlier blog on this, this is the Japanese emoticom for the smiley face . . . who knew emoticoms need translation, too?]
Check it out! Here are some urls:
Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/
Institute for the Future http://www.futureofthebook.org/
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Problems with Zotero
JSTOR:
The problem appears to be with JSTOR itself and that it has made an update to its site that makes it incompatible with Zotero. So, as we found, you can save the bibliographic data from the search page, but when you are in article view the Zotero icon does not appear in the url bar.
This issue and other JSTOR compatibility problems are more pronounced when you use an off-campus proxy address to access JSTOR and other databases - they are working on this too.
PDFs:
Dan Stillman, who is one of the programs developers, wrote on one of the Zotero forums: "Annotations do not work with PDF files, only HTML and image files. Since PDFs are loaded by plugins, we don't have any way of accessing the internal structure. Acrobat offers some built-in annotation functions, though, and it may be possible that Zotero would be able to read such data in the future (for example, to index it for searching)."
Another PDF issue: People are wondering if they can import bibliographic information from PDFs already existing on their hard drives into Zotero. Currently there is no automatic way of doing this because the PDF format is not regularized (ie. there is no common place where citation information is stored). However, there are ways around this: one of these is to find a link to the PDF in Google Scholar or JSTOR, download this citation information, and then manually attach the PDF to the item.
There is also a program called cb2Bib that helps extract unformatted, or unstandardized biblographic references from email alerts, journal Web pages, and PDF files. I haven’t played around with this yet, but it was mentioned on some of the forums. It was also suggested that Zotero find a way to incorporate this program into its interface. You can find the program at: http://www.molspaces.com/cb2bib/
Another frustrating problem:
Highlights and annotations seem to be saved only when you leave the snapshot view by going to another website. They are not saved when you simply close the Firefox tab (this only happens when you are using tabs, not completely new windows). This problem also occurs if you open the same snapshot in multiple windows/tabs and then make changes to the first one to be closed. Likewise, if you are highlighting and making comments in a document, click on a link that takes you to another page, and then navigate back to the original snapshot, your annotations disappear. You have to reopen the snapshot directly from Zotero to get them back.
Back-ups:
There is currently no good way to back up all the information stored in Zotero. Zotero 2.0 will give you the option of saving your info on a central server, which could then be accessed from any web-enabled computer, but for now everything is stored locally. To backup Zotero you need to do the following:
Close Firefox and then copy the Zotero folder, stored in a subdirectory of your Firefox profile directory, to an external drive. The Zotero folder holds your database and all the related files (images, PDFs, webpages, etc.) and can usually be found in these locations:
On a Mac:
/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/<randomstring>/zotero
On Windows 2000/XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\ApplicationData\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<randomstring>\zotero
On Windows Vista:
C:\users\<User Name>AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<randomstring>\zotero
If you need to restore your information you can simply place your archived backup Zotero folder into a new Firefox profile.
(adapted from the Zotero forum website)
So, it seems as if they still have quite a bit of work to do (as with all betas)! But if we are aware of the problems and learn how to work around them it is still an incredibly useful tool – and it will only get better.
Just a note of interest:
The name “Zotero” is loosely based on the Albanian word zotëroj, meaning “to acquire, to master,” as in learning.
Zoe Jones