Comments on: The future of Zotero

By: sarah.werner

sarah.werner — Sun, 29 May 2011 20:04:12 +0000

I’ve never used Zotero as much as I feel like I should, in part because using a citation manager has never been part of my work flow. But, as someone who relies heavily on library catalog records of rare materials, I would love to be able to use Zotero more readily to generate the sort of crowd-sourcing possibilities you mention–comparing the physical characteristics of many different copies of the first edition of Paradise Lost would be really helpful. I very much the idea of breaking away from a citation focus to see what else Zotero can do for us in the sort of ways that you describe.

By: Craig

Craig — Fri, 20 May 2011 06:00:50 +0000

some good points made here Tim. I will have to use Zetoro some more

By: Trevor

Trevor — Thu, 19 May 2011 02:27:40 +0000

Sketching ideas for apps that could be built on top of the increasingly decoupled Zotero system is a cool idea. As I understand it, some of the next phases of work involve the write API and running translators as a web service. Those two things enable a ton of potential.

In the same space, I have increasingly been using Zotero to do data collection. Specifically, collecting 300 of what Flickr says are the most interesting Zombie images on a given day, archiving and annotating web pages as part of more ethnographic research on rpgmakervx.net, or gathering and coding yelp and tripadvisor reviews of the Albert Einstein Memorial. In each case, Zotero’s web scrap book functionality, full text search, tagging and annotating are really cool. Now, I think there is a lot that some of the upcoming work on Zotero could help take these nice data collection capabilities and augment them with very cool data display and visualization capabilities.

By: fbennett

fbennett — Tue, 17 May 2011 00:52:47 +0000

Comments in this line are gratifying. With citeproc-js and CSL 1.0 settling in chez Zotero 2.1, there are very few citation issues that can’t be handled gracefully by the system. We see this on the Zotero forums: many issues that once provoked long discussions can now be addressed by a simple link to the CSL specification. With a few modest extensions to infrastructure, we will be on track to build out solid, deep, thoroughly tested support for all major styles. There is work to do there, but not a lot to discuss.

I too am excited about the possibilities for harvesting, crowd-sourcing and recombination of metadata. Like Avram, I look forward to lending a hand, as I can, to help expand the possibilities in this area.

By: ajlyon

ajlyon — Mon, 16 May 2011 18:54:41 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot about researchers working with archives to crowdsource digitization. A clean system that encouraged the production of usable metadata, and wasn’t too hard for the researchers, could change the way some archives work. And I think that Zotero could play a real role there– I tried to hack something together using tethered shooting, but I still haven’t gotten to where I’m happy with any workflow.

The API could change all that, since then we can use the bibliographic back-end of Zotero and write the front-end in whatever we please…

Anyway– I wish I were a bit closer to the site, and I look forward to helping make the session’s dreams a reality.