Comments on: Ideas about Zotero and Digitized Archives

By: Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog » Blog Archive » Zotero News, Big and Small

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 15:27:34 +0000

[...] about Zotero, see posts on the blogs of Bill Turkel, Bruce D’Arcus (1, 2), Adrian Cooke, Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, and Mark Phillipson.) We’re planning on rolling all of the bug fixes and a few of the [...]

By: William J. Turkel

William J. Turkel — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 15:20:53 +0000

To add to the comments above, Zotero will support collaborative work with server-side apps. See Dan Cohen's post of 19 Sep (and my musings, unknowingly posted at the same time).

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 14:53:01 +0000

Data is stored in a local SQLite database. Firefox 2.0 provides out-of-box support for the embedded SQL database, so they are using that. So it’s all open standards and software, and you can imagine that this + RDF + a network will enable some interesting possibilities in terms of social networking, data synchronization, etc.

Users? Students, scholars, researchers.

By: rob shelton

rob shelton — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 16:24:12 +0000

I’ve been testing zotero and have to say it is fabulous. Although I have not had a chance to check out all of the features, I like what I see so far. It performs well at creating bibliographies from online sources, despite one or two small hitches. I hope to see if it can easily tag notes from sources and then produce a print out of all notes with the same tags (i.e., search my collections for notes tagged “slavery” & “New Orleans” & “steamboats” and print out all notes that have those tags, along with citations. Also, I am curious about where the records are stored? In firefox profiles? How portable are they? And will there be scalability issues–limits to the amount of material I can note? So far though, I am completely impressed with its ease of use and functionality. Great job!

By: Josh Greenberg

Josh Greenberg — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 02:34:10 +0000

As one of the “Zotero guys”, I’ll hold off on an elaborate explanation for the moment, but let me just drop a cryptic hint that server-side apps that would extend Zotero into a social, collaborative space are *very much* in our minds. More on that soon, hopefully (once we ship the actual extension)…

By: Jeanne

Jeanne — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 15:35:06 +0000

Thomas,

I suspect that the initial users would be the professional academics and graduate students who spend their time organizing vast research projects. That said – I can imagine that it will catch on quickly with anyone who does research online and is frustrated with the limits to bookmarking pages or saving them offline as a method of keeping track of what they have found.

I also do not think that the intention is for social or collaborative sharing of research (though I love the idea). I do wonder how hard it will be to configure Zotero in a library setting to look at USB thumb drives as the right place to find/write data – at least that would keep you from being tied to a single Zotero repository on a single computer.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 15:22:53 +0000

My basic question about Zotero is whether or not it is 'social' in the 2.0 sense of the word. Will Zotero users be able to share resources, view other people usage or is it designed strictly for personal web accumulation. Jeanne, I realize you may not be able to answer this question, but William Turkel's Digital History Hacks blog doesn't seem to allow comments. Social software aside, it will be very interesting to see to what extent the library world adopts Zotero. Who will be Zotero's core users; students, professional academics, librarians, other enthusiastic netizens such as genealogists? As of early September 2006 it all seems so mysterious.

By: Jeanne

Jeanne — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:22:12 +0000

I read your review – and of course it makes me even more excited for the official release! The only other big question I had was if it stores your information locally on your computer or somewhere in a central database. I suspect (more now than before I read your review of the pre-release) that it is local. I would love to be able to get at my Zotero information from any computer (be it in a library or on my laptop or on my home desktop).

By: William J. Turkel

William J. Turkel — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 11:59:02 +0000

I'm pretty excited about Zotero, too, and I recently had a chance to write a review of the pre-release beta on my blog. Like you, I dream of being able to click a button and have an entire collection of digital sources downloaded to Zotero. Although that is not possible at the moment (as far as I know) I think that it should be possible to modify the software to have that kind of functionality. Three cheers for open source!