Comments on: Zotero

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

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 15:27:30 +0000

[...] and thoughts 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 [...]

By: Ken

Ken — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 19:30:24 +0000

I must say, I’m perplexed. While the prospect of developing open citation standards is intriguing, there’s no reason why this couldn’t be integrated into the Endnote platform, as well. EN currently offers far more functionality to users, especially when used in combination with the EN Firefox extension. I suspect those who disagree really aren’t very familiar with the program, or have very distant memories of the earlier versions. I have looked at each public version of Zotero as it’s been released, and can’t find anything it does that Endnote doesn’t do better. Of course, I understand that it’s not free, but US$80 is really very little for the functionality – and adaptability – it offers.

By: Zotero - The Next-Generation Research Tool » Blog Archive » You Don’t Have to Take Our Word For It

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 18:50:15 +0000

[...] “Researchers, students and librarians everywhere wondering how they ever did without it.” Dead Reckoning [...]

By: Quædam cuiusdam » Blog Archive » Zotero hiring

Quædam cuiusdam » Blog Archive » Zotero hiring — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 16:36:42 +0000

[...] As if Zotero weren’t already looking cool enough, it now appears they’re hiring a senior programmer and a “Technology Evangelist” on two-year contracts. (This according to an email forwarded to the Code4Lib list by Raymond Yee; I can’t find a posting online). Since the programmer needs PHP and MySQL on top of Firefox skills, we can assume they’ll be getting serious about the collaborative possibilities of Zotero. Dan Cohen tantalizes us: What if you could share a folder of references and notes with a colleague across the country? What if you could receive a feed of new resources in your area of interest? What if you could synchronize your Zotero library with a server and access it from anywhere? What if you could send your personal collection to other web services, e.g., a mapping service or text analyzer or translation engine? [...]

By: Ideas about Zotero and Digitized Archives - SpellboundBlog.com - ponderings of an archives student

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:19:08 +0000

[...] Now on Dead Reckoning’s post on Zotero RDFa is mentioned. I don’t know anything about RDFa beyond what I have read in the last few hours, so it is not clear to me how complicated the metadata can be – perhaps it can support a full digital object XML record of some kind. So maybe the trick isn’t so much getting Zotero to do things it wasn’t designed to do – but rather the slow migration of sites to using the software packages and standards listed here. [...]

By: William J. Turkel

William J. Turkel — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 11:49:52 +0000

Zotero actually does find embedded citation information on webpages automatically ... there is more information in a review of the prerelease beta on my blog.

By: Ads

Ads — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 07:14:46 +0000

Great discussion, thanks. I was first introduced to EndNote as an college student in the late 1990s. I appreciated the concept but found having a separate application for reference management to be more of a burden than a boon since I used my computer’s file system (and my physical file system) as the primary means of keeping track of materials. For me EndNote never really went beyond the promise of what such a program could do. The Zotero vision has an edge, in my opinion, because (1) it seems to be designed with an eye to the workflows that people actually use (browser » word processor » browser, etc.), (2) because it’s open source (especially being a Firefox extension), and (3) — as you said — because it’s open standards.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 14:08:31 +0000

Oh, and I also think there’s a great opportunity for Zotero to ramp a lot of good data onto the web outside the control of the journal publishers and such. Scholarship is a perfect use case for the semantic web.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 14:02:46 +0000

It was a dedicated Mac product, produced and maintained by a company that seemed to care about doing right by its users. So it was a relatively stable application, where as I recall new releases had new features that were worth paying for.

My impression is that ISI sees the product as nothing but a cash cow. How else to explain the contemptible practice of their yearly $100 bug fix? Last I checked, it seems the product has become more buggy and less interesting.

I gave up Endnote in disgust years ago after beta testing the first Mac OS X version (and among other things having a product manager tell me when I complained to “use another product if you don’t like Endnote”!) in search of better open source solutions. When I didn’t find them, I started working on finding out how to create them.

Zotero is sort of the first example of this in that while I was not involved directly in the development, they are using the new XML Citation Style Language I developed (mostly to use in OpenOffice) to replace the proprietary binary styles in applications like Endnote.

I think the combination of open source and open standards is likely to mean the end of products like Endnote in the medium run, and I say good riddance. We’ll have better products, and greater freedom of choice.

It’ll just take a little time as projects like Zotero and the OpenOffice bibliographic project ramp up. This is a complicated problem to fix, since it touches on a lot of areas (date, document formats, styling, etc.).

By: Ads

Ads — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:27:41 +0000

Thanks Bruce. I looked for information on EndNote’s origins but was unable to find anything. What was better about it when it was owned by Niles? Do you think it was ultimately crippled by feature creep under ISI/Thomson?

And yes, I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what Zotero can do.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:14:05 +0000

Actually, Endnote is much older than the version ISI first released. It was in general a better (relative) product before ISI bought it from its original developer (Niles Software). It was probably first released in the very early 1990s.

And yes, I think it’s fair to say that Zotero and similar developments will totally eclipse applications like Endnote in fairly short time.