Monday, October 30, 2006

Zotero! Endnote-free bibliography tool

Now I have Firefox 2.0 at last I can try Zotero! Zotero claims to do most of the things I used to like about Endnote, and much much more, with none of the horrible "side effects" like when Endnote takes over your computer and makes it feel like 286 or Return of 1984.

Even with just half an hour playing with Zotero I am hugely impressed, it:

grabs references from the University library and from EBSCO
lets me save the PDF to my hard-drive and link it to the reference
automatically guesses the format book/article etc., but allows me to change that later
lets me write notes about the item
does not slow my computer down to a crawl
or cite as I write (happily letting me create my bibliography and citations, but only create the bibliography when I am good and ready

So far I have only two reservations:

There is not yet a format for book reviews - and although it is not something I often do, sometimes one wants to cite a reviewers comments on a work one is discussing. (I have mentioned this on the Zotero forum, so maybe it will be added, that's a great advantage over this sort of open[ish?] software development.
Though it handles the University Library catalogue brilliantly (it's Voyager) it does not cope with the Carey library (which is Liberty3)

Labels: teaching

¶ 11:37 AM

[to Del.icio.us]

Of course, the connection functionality for Liberty3 is an extra add-on (Z39.50 database server), which may not be installed or enabled on the Carey setup. I seem to remember dicussions with DML about getting Endnote to access their Liberty3 catalogue stalled because of the extra cost of enabling it.

By Stephen G, at May 12, 2007 3:50 PM

Or the problem is the fact that Liberty3 is set up to only produce catelogue lists - you can't click on a work and get a single page just for that work. Maybe there's too much information on the page to parse?

By Stephen G, at May 12, 2007 4:32 PM