bk!

While working today, and generally procrastinating by blog-surfing and checking out several bloggers’ linkblogs, I pondered the amount of time spent tagging things in bookmark managers and never reusing the info. I typically only bookmark a website if I expect that I’ll need it in the next couple of days. Otherwise I rely on Google/Google Desktop to find it again. Other times I’m not so lucky. This is just a small example of my own inability to productively manage information I come across and might need again. There have been cool tools, but none have quite fit the bill, because they’re ultimately unuseful to me as really productive work-related tools. Later today day I was reading an issue of the Green Bag, and found an article I really wanted to save for later. This really got my little fingers furiously searching for a good solution. Something had to be out there.

Enter Zotero!

If you write and use citations and references in your writing [lawyers, that would be you], you need Zotero. Zotero is a Firefox extension that’s a reference manager (like endnote for humanities writers). It’s totally free, open source,* and completely awesome. The developers are implementing multiple citation styles (hopefully to include the bluebook).

Here’s what it does:

• captures citation information from webpages automagically
• formats citations
• helps you organize all sorts of reference sources
• interface is familiar (looks like playlists a la itunes – organize your items into collections!)
• lets you take notes (full text search, too)
• lets you tag (some are even automagic) and share your sources
• allows you to store PDFs in the extension
• enables webpage/blog snapshots (so you make make sure you still have the information, even if the site disappears)
• integrates with word
• can be used offline
• next phase: users and groups can exchange, aggregate, and recommend digital texts and resources. Users will be able to receive recommendations and feeds (and backup their reference libraries properly).

The plans for Zotero blow my mind in a million different ways. Totally Kuhnian in its approach to distributed and social academic collaboration. Although most academic professions share some degree of information in a friendly sort of way, it’s usually in the end product. What’s not in the end product (legal case, journal article) is equally as important as the final sources. Sharing this information is what Zotero calls “leveraging the long tail of scholarship.”This represents what might be a coming broad shift from competition to collaboration in knowledge work - at least the bits and pieces of it.

The ability to share in a structured way is just as valuable as the sharing itself. The information is reusable – each bibliographic item contains the least bit of information it can while still being valuable. The efficiencies are enormous. The beauty is that we can also share thoughts and ideas by the way we tag and organize these snips of reusable data. Each user can take advantage of shared knowledge in whatever way suits them best.

Add to that serious knowledge management (no more “what was the name/author of that article/case?) and the ability to cross-reference different sources, which is an incredibly powerful tool (especially when the social aspect of zotero is implemented).

I am excited for now – I really need a tool to help me manage items like this, but I really can’t wait to see how sharing bibliographic information with friends and colleagues will change my work (oh, I’m such a lawyer). Unlike many sharing sources, I think that the sharing features of Zotero might be structured with some element of trust (that would be the group part, as referenced above), which may make finding good relevant sources easier to find in the wexis haystack.

Zotero has a bit of a way to go until perfection, but given user participation, the dedicated production team and bankroll*, I expect that Zotero will be the new standard in research/reference management (especially since Zotero uses open standards for importing and exporting/API). It may take some time before bluebook standards are fully implemented. Zotero’s forums are very active, and they’ve opened up a special one just for the law problem (i.e., our citation standards are 400 pages long, and have different standards for academic and practical writing).

Check out the screencast and quick start guide. There’s only so much explaining one can do. Experience is better. You will need Firefox 2.0 to use Zotero.

Some quick user notes – Create new item from page creates a bibliographic item and snapshot. The link creator is just a link creator, although you can still tag and take notes from it. If you’re interested in adding metadata to your site that will make it more compatible with zotero, there are some plugins to help you.

* Zotero was developed by the Center for History & New Media at GMU, which has a great history of developing and promoting tools for researchers. Funded by: United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.