This Is Your Life 2.0

Lots of (smart!) people use RefWorks or EndNote to organize their citations. You may ask “why bother using Zotero?” There are lots of great reasons:

• Zotero is free! You don’t have to pay a cent for it.
• It resides right on your Firefox browser and captures information from the Web.
• The interface is designed with you – the Web surfer – in mind. You can surf the Web and save items at the same time.
• Zotero allows you to tag, write notes and attach files to your items, drag and drop, mark up pdfs and web pages AND MORE….

The more you know about it, the more you’ll love using it.

What exactly is ?

Zotero is an open source Firefox Add-on which can be easily installed on both your private computers and those in university labs. It enables users to collect, manage, and cite research from all types of sources. The citations captured by Zotero can be books from Amazon, Google Books, and Library catalogs (e.g. WorldCat). It also captures papers from Google Scholar, subscriber online databases, e.g. Web of Science or ABI/Inform. It can generate bibliographies automatically in wikis, blogs, Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer.

The name is loosely derived from an Albanian verb meaning “to master”. Don’t worry – it won’t bite your machine! It was developed by some very smart people at Carnegie Mellon University.

To see what Zotero can do, check out these screencasts.

A complete Zotero tutorial has been posted here: http://sites.google.com/site/zoteroworkshopsite/Home

If you don’t have time for the whole lesson, just complete Items 1 & 2. You won’t regret it!

http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2007/08/zotero.html

http://efficientacademic.wordpress.com/2006/12/01/zotero-review/

http://ideophone.org/zotero-etymology/

This lesson was created for the Digital Media Project, a joint project of UBC School of Library, Archival and Information Studies and the Irving K Barber Learning Centre.