Zotero - A Researcher’s Friend
While some continue to argue the legitimacy of wikipedia as a source worth citing, the Internet continues to be a valuable resource for research. Many books in the public domain are available online as are research reports and study results.
The problem has always been how to collect and inventory online resources. Many educators use their browser bookmarks, or online bookmark sites such as del.icio.us or Murl. But bookmarking is not really collecting and then there is the problem of citing your sources.
Enter Zotero.
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.
Getting Started
The developers have written a rather thorough Quick Start Guide. The guide will walk you through installation.
After you have restarted FireFox 2.0, to access Zotero, either click the Zotero name in the status bar or hold CTRL-ALT-Z, and the Zotero interface will appear.
Manage
The first pane is the Management area. Here you can organize your items into collections. You can also create and save searches across your collected items. Very useful if you have been click happy and just grabbed anything vaguely related to your topic.
Collect
So what are we going to collect? Lets start with a newspaper article. We visit the NY Times and find an article that we like. Zotero recognizes that this is a newspaper and places a newspaper icon in the address bar. Click the icon, and the article is added to your collection.
Zotero allows you to collect snapshots of web pages, add notes, books, journal articles, newspaper articles, and films. Other entries such as art works, audio, bills, emails, podcasts, and a host of others are also available.
Not only can online resources be used, but local files can also be added or linked to the collection.
Cite
Remember that article we pulled from the NY Times? Zotero parsed the article when we added it to our collection and pulled out the title, the author, the publication, the date and even the ISSN. Wait, that sounds like the information we need for creating a citation. Exactly. When you right click on the newspaper item, there is an option to “Create Bibliography from Selected Item…”. Zotero asks if you would like the citation to be in the American Psychological Association, Chicago Manual of Style, or Modern Language Association formats. Here is an example in the MLA format:
Nagourney, Adam, and Robin Toner. “G.O.P. Glum as It Struggles to Hold Congress.” The New York Times. (2006). 5 November 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/us/politics/05elect.html?hp&ex=1162702800&en=2053acbcb6f551e1&ei=5094.
Conclusion
Zotero seems to be a very robust application that we expect to be very useful for educators. Our brief article here does not do this plugin justice. Grab Zotero and give it a try for yourself.