Langsdale Link
Contents:
- Welcome from the new director
- Alert, Alert!: Tables of Contents and other stuff
- Citing Sources gets Easier with Zotero
- No Parking, No Problem: Save Time and Travel with Langsdale
- Leading Langsdale Library
- Langsdale is looking for a few good books
- New Databases at Langsdale Library
- Meet Our New Staff
Citing Sources gets Easier with Zotero
You’re doing research for a class, and you’ve found some great articles online. How do you make sure you have all the information you need to cite the article?
You could write down the citation information, cut it and paste it into a Word document, or buy a citation manager like Endnote. But if you’re short on time or money and you’re a Firefox user, you’ll want to try Zotero (http://www.zotero.org). Zotero is a Firefox extension that lets you store, organize, annotate and export information you’re collecting for research. Zotero can import, store and cite items in any language and the interface can be tailored to a variety of languages, including Chinese, Spanish, French, Hebrew and Russian.
Whether you’re gathering information from the library’s catalog, Amazon, a library database or a blog entry, Zotero can collect bibliographic information that makes creating a bibliography using those sources much easier. Zotero allows you to capture the data you’re looking at, which in some cases may mean downloading a copy of a particular article, and in others taking a screenshot of the page. The best part is that all of this collection can be done with one click and Zotero does the rest.
Zotero grabs a "snapshot" (local copy) of any webpage or downloaded file (PDF, DOC, XLS, etc.), and grabs metadata about the snapshot (author, title, URL, date accessed, etc.); you can add any missing or additional information for later reference. Zotero also lets you tag items for easier retrieval, and you can organize your items into folders (by class or project, for example).
After all of this information is collected Zotero allows users to export citations to a bibliography. With only a few clicks Zotero can import your citation into Microsoft Word, Open Office, Notepad or a number of other compatible programs.
Zotero was created by students and faculty at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University with grants from the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Zotero is an open-source project that gets a lot of feedback from users, and feature requests are often worked into future versions. One of the most popular requests is coming to the new 1.5 version: the ability access your Zotero library of files from any computer (Firefox 3.0+ required).
If you’re interested in learning more about Zotero’s capabilities or how Zotero works, please attend one of our Zotero workshops:
Zotero: Free Citation Management Software
Monday, 10/20/2008: 4:30 - 5:30 PM , LL 401
Tuesday, 10/21/2008: 4:30 - 5:30 PM, LL 401
Wednesday, 10/22/2008: 12:30 - 1:30 PM, LL 401
Learn about Zotero, a free, intuitive citation management software. Zotero allows users to collect, organize, manage and store information from the web, databases or books and can format and export citations into a Word document. This is a great alternative to RefWorks or End Note. This workshop will serve as an introduction to the tool.
For more information, contact Thomas Arendall-Salvetti , Coordinator of Library Instruction, at (410) 837-4275 or tarendall-salvetti@ubalt.edu.