Research ∕ Learning

Zotero again

Lorcan 1 min read

I mentioned Zotero the other day. I am submerged in several assignments and will not be able to look at it myself for a little while. In the interim, here are some mild opinions, tentatively offered:

There are a range of generic options (create a new citation from scratch, capture current web page, capture link, create snapshot). More importantly, there are specific options when Zotero recognizes a page it knows how to scrape from: you see an icon in the location bar, like the RSS icon when Firefox discovers a feed. Click it to capture the citation. It did a decent job of grabbing book citations from our OPAC and from Amazon, and quite a nice job of grabbing article citations from JSTOR–with one important caveat, discussed below. By default it takes a snapshot when it creates a record, but this seems a little slow and I turned it off. Beyond individual books and articles, you see a folder icon when you’re on the search results screen in JSTOR: you can save the whole set of 25 records with one operation (though you need to check them off one by one: it needs a “check all” option). It takes a while, but it’s very cool. But turn off the snapshots: not only were they excruciatingly slow, they ended up as empty PDFs. [Quædam cuiusdam » Blog Archive » Zotero – A First Glance]

Read the full entry for more details.

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