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Thanks to Jason Puckett, I’ve become a huge fan of Zotero.

So I’d collected a cast number of citations in Zotero, but needed to export them in a custom format to a .csv if I wanted to upload them into another database. I was also a little put-off that Zotero’s search wasn’t more powerful (that’s just me being picky- Zotero is awesome and anyone who says otherwise will get an earful from me).

A little Googling led me to this post by Royce Kimmons that discusses how to query Zotero’s SQLite database.

(This post is largely a short summary of Mr. Kimmons’- but it is such a neat trick that I wanted to share it.)

Zotero’s database is SQLite. For me, the database was located here:

C:\Users\[UserID]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[random string].default\zotero\zotero.sqlite

In your OS, it may be elsewhere. According to Zotero’s support documentation,  ”[t]he quickest and most reliable way to find your Zotero data directory is through the “Show Data Directory” button in the Advanced tab of your Zotero window.”

Once you find it, COPY it somewhere else to work with it. Don’t monkey with your original database.

Then you need a tool for working with the copied database. Kimmons recommends SQLite Manager, a Firefox plugin, but I ended up using SQLiteStudio (free, portable application that requires no installation) and found it much more pleasant to work with.

Even knowing next to nothing about Zotero’s data model, I could modify Kimmons’ query to get just the data I wanted, exactly how I wanted it.

Another option is to export the SQLite as SQL and run your searches using your favorite database tool (even MS Access).

January 17th, 2012 | Category: Databases, How to, Technology, Tools | Comments Off

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.

November 7th, 2011 | Category: For Medical Libraryfolk, Teaching/Training, Technology, Tools | Comments (10)