Zotero

I’ve been using Zotero for more than a year now.  It’s a Firefox add-on that I can’t live without!  There’s some pretty nifty features including a capture or scraping function of citation information from Web pages.  For certain Web sites, it will recognize the type of citation – just as there’s a little symbol that appears in your address bar when you’re on an RSS feed page (to make it easier to add a page as an RSS feed), Zotero recognizes certain resource pages that have citations on them (most Library catalogues and aggregated subscription journal databases and Amazon) and provide a little widget in your address bar to make it easier to add one or more citations to Zotero.  It’s really quite neat and a bit more slick than the direct export method for aggreagated subscription journal databases to something like RefWorks.

Sadly, Zotero is only stored on your local system (currently), but is easily backed up as an RDF file or exported and an RIS file.  Zotero will really excel with some new features the Center for History and New Media at George Mason Univesity are looking to add including remote citation library backup, access to your citation library from anywhere via the Web, recommendation engine and RSS feeds, and shared collection….so much more accessible in a networked environment with Web 2.0 features.  Once Zotero gets to this stage, it will be much more comparable to RefWorks or Connotea…and perhaps even a little beyond.

If you haven’t, I’d say give Zotero a try!

(Originally posted to the OCUL RefWorks Canada list on April 30, 2008)