Cooking With Linux

Zotero is a free Firefox extension that any Librarian, bibliographer or researcher would
not want to be without.

It is not necessary to write a "how to" here. The Zotero website has excellent documentation
including videos. Basically, what Zotero does is when Zotero senses that you are
looking at a bibliographic record for an item, a small blue square appears in the address bar
of Firefox. You can click on that blue box and Zotero will harvest as much bibliographic
information that it can and save it in its database. The amount of information automatically
collected will depend on the online catalogue that you are searching. The rest is easily
copied via cut and paste. This all takes place in a window at the bottom of Firefox.

Zotero is very intuitive, once you have imported your first record, just start clicking around the various components and you will see that it is a very powerful program.

I have found Zotero to be very useful at the Wellington Law Association Library where I work.
The Library system that my library belongs to is high tech in that it has a union
catalogue that links the collections of all of the 48 county law libraries in Ontario. My
little library's collection is catalogued using the same software that the United States Library of Congress uses.

However, the circulation tracking is very low tech as patrons sign book cards when they take books out. Truly horse and buggy tech, but an automated system like KOHA would be overkill. At my library, I use Zotero along with JabRef to help keep track of what is signed out as well as keeping a record of the items that have circulated over the year.

Zotero is very helpful with reference questions. When I am asked to find books on a topic I can search the catalogue, save the pertinent records to a separate collection file within Zotero and then use this collection file to create a formatted bibliography that I can e-mail to the patron. There are many formats to choose from and a module that you can use to write your own format. The same process I use to answer reference questions also makes writing overdue notices a snap!

Exporting records in Bibtex format for use in other programs is supported as well. Programs
that support Bibtex include: Jabref, Pybliographer, Sixpack, Tellico. Depending on your needs
Zotero may do the job for you or you may still require one of the programs above. The key to
remember is that Zotero can act as a data harvester to prepare the data for easy entry into the programs listed here. And do not forget about Lyx which is a program for writing papers that will read and interpret Bibtex bibliographies.

Bibtex is a bibliographic database format that links to the Latex document creation program. Most of the academic papers published in academic journals recently have been prepared using Latex or a derivative of Latex and Bibtex. Latex has a steep learning curve, and you will have to use it often to master it. There are some excellent Latex editors out there, but that would be the content of another article.

However, Zotero has extensions for Word and OpenOffice that takes advantage of the Bibtex format for inserting citations and bibliographies. This is a feature that use to be only available in (rather expensive) bibliographic programs.

Once you start using Zotero, you will not want to be without it.

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Zotero http://www.zotero.org/

JabRef http://jabref.sourceforge.net/
Lyx http://www.lyx.org/
Pybliographer http://www.pybliographer.org/
Sixpack http://www.santafe.edu/~dirk/sixpack/
Tellico http://periapsis.org/tellico/