Zotero : Things to get right capturing and sharing records

In this workshop we will be reviewing the most important things to get right in capturing data for your own use and for sharing it in groups of collaborative researchers.   This workshop will assume that you have Zotero intalled and a working sync account.  We will arrange robust WIFI, and go over:

* Selecting Item Types

* Adding, storing and searching PDF attachments

* Good sources for meta-data

* Tagging

* Collections and classification

* Finding lost records

* Exporting records and bibliographies

* Sharing data

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, are available at http://www.zotero.org. Zotero is a powerful tool for gathering, analysing and sharing research materials of all kinds, and it has been specifically developed to help scholars keep control of digital materials that can be found online.

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 harvesting and indexing of pdf files
• Automated extraction of annotations and highlights from PDF files
• Document types (like video, letter, manuscript) that match the research materials of humanities researchers
• Tagging, search and infinite rich text annotation for note taking
• Automated synchronisation and backup of data in the Internet Cloud
• Very powerful collaboration amongst researchers