Why Use Zotero?

Hello, my name is Andrew Weymouth and I work at the University of Idaho Library as the Digital Initiatives Librarian in the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) department. I focuses on using static web technology to curate the institution’s special collections and partners with faculty and students to create custom fellowship projects. I also develop digital tools and workflows to enhance transcription, tagging, and image processing to make the university’s media, text, and visual resources more discoverable for researchers. For all of the research that I do to publish articles for my position, and also as a graduate student myself here at the University, where I am pursuing an MA in History, I use Zotero to store and organize scholarly materials.

As a student, keeping track of a huge amount of research material can feel impossible. Have you ever been working on a paper and you have the perfect example that you would like to use but you have no idea what the name of the paper or site where you saw that information? Have you ever accidentally assumed a paper needed to be in one citation style that was actually another and needed to take hours tediously reworking in-line and end note formatting?

Considering how difficult it is to organize a firehose of information you receive over the course of a semester, now imagine how difficult it will be when you need to find that book passage, scholarly journal or web site (which may or may not exist anymore) years afterwards when you are finishing your undergraduate degree, and either working on a master’s thesis or PhD. Zotero provides a great solution to all of these challenges by being able to store, annotate and preserve your digital documents throughout the research lifecycle.

As illustrated in the animation for this workshop, this lifecycle includes:

• Organization of materials, which you can completely customize depending on your preferences
• Adding metadata, tagging and annotation to your documents, so you can make connections between text materials
• Searching and synthesizing those tags and annotations within Zotero, to help bring up just the information you are looking for
• And, at the end of your research cycle, compressing and exporting your documents for future reference, so you can preserve all of your notes while keeping the storage size of your library as low as possible

Background

Zotero is an open source reference management software developed by the Corporation for Digital Scholarship (formerly by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University) in 2006. Since jumping from an academic tool to incorporation in 2013, the software has gained widespread adoption by academics, students and researchers as a more versatile and digital preservation focused alternative to other citation managers like EndNote and Mendeley.

In addition to the research cycle I mentioned, this workshop will show you how to set up your account, add browser plug-ins and think about a few different ways you can organize your Zotero library depending on your research focus and timeline.