Zotero Workshop
This workshop will provide a brief basic introduction to installing Zotero, but it will also focus on problems of use, including finding references in a large library, adding notes, inserting Zotero references in to Word documents, sharing libraries, tagging, automatically storing attached data files, and the Zotero commons.
Zotero is an Open Source digital research platform developed by the Centre for History and New Media at George Mason University. The software and documentation, including video tutorials, is available at http://www.zotero.org. Zotero is a very powerful tool for gathering, analysing and sharing materials of all kinds, and it has been specifically developed to help scholars keep control of digital materials that can be found online. In my view it is vastly superior to the other tools on the market, most of which are not freely available.
The key features of Zotero include:
- The ability to automatically harvest references from libraries, newspapers and online catalogues (including the South African National Archives repository)
- Full text downloading and indexing of pdf files
- Document types (like video, letter, manuscript) that match the research materials of humanities researchers
- Tagging and infinite rich text annotation
- Automated synchronisation and backup of data in the Internet Cloud
The workshop will be hosted in the WISER seminar room.
(The tutorial will be much more useful if you have already downloaded and installed Zotero on a machine, and registered for an account on http://zotero.org.)