Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Educators
Certain librarianish tendencies seem to have stuck for good, despite the fact that I don’t work in a library any more.
Wanting to structure data about publishing/presenting by members of my department’s faculty, I quickly grew rustrated with RefWorks because it doesn’t do NLM citations properly and it doesn’t even have a Ref Type for Presentations. (My view, by the way, is that it is false advertising for RefWorks to claim that it supports NLM. It doesn’t. Not correctly and not thoroughly.)
So I started again looking at Zotero, which I dreaded. The last time I tried it, I found it frustrating and quickly gave up.
This time, though, I had a secret weapon: Jason Puckett. Jason is a friend and I knew he was a sharp and terribly nice guy with great taste- but I had no idea how good his book was.
Jason’s book, Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Educators is outstanding. I’m a fussy critic of writing, but I loved Jason’s. The structure of the book is simple, the writing is clear and friendly. This book got me up to speed on Zotero much faster than if I’d just relied on the documentation and my own experimentation.
Thanks to this quick start, I discovered that Zotero is far more powerful than RefWorks and accomplishes much more in far less time.
If you ever were curious about Zotero, get the book and start playing with it. If you’re a RefWorks user, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much more powerful Zotero is while still being pretty darn easy to use.
ALA Folks: You can buy a DRM-Free version here.
Medical Libraryfolk: I’m curious. What are your favorite tools for managing bibliographic data? Really, please let me know in the comments or drop me an email. I want to manage the data of all publishing/presentation done by members of our faculty and I’d welcome suggestions of what tools to try.
