Friday 20 August 2010

Zotero

What on earth does "Leveraging the long tail of scholarship" mean?? I am puzzled.

Is this the long tail of scholarship?

Image by Kookr (David Cook Wildlife Photography)
(from Flickr, under Creative Commons)


Or perhaps this is it, being leveraged?

Image by Billyboy (Billy Lindblom)
(from Flickr, under Creative Commons)


I am also a bit confused by "The Web now has a wrangler".

Both of these things appeared under the Zotero logo at various times on its site, when I eventually worked out how to install it (I had to resort to the troubleshooting section, as it wouldn't automatically put up the download screen). Did they encourage me? Does the name? You have two guesses ...

I have found making myself look at this Thing really difficult. Luckily I do have Firefox on my work computer. Otherwise I would have been totally stymied, and would just have given up. I last created a bibliography (using no artificial aids) when I did my Library MA dissertation. This was some years ago, which perhaps says everything that needs to be said about how much use I can see for this tool in my personal life at the moment. My comments about Delicious are probably also relevant here - I don't bookmark much on the internet, and doubt that the things that I have bookmarked would be of much interest to others. I suppose that if I worked in a subject-specific library, creating bibliographies of resources via Zotero might work well, but working in a College library, and dealing with a multitude of subjects, I can only really direct students to more specific sources of information. If others have made Zotero work for them in these contexts, I am grateful!

I've never had a student ask for advice on how to create a bibliography. I could now suggest that they look at Zotero if they did, as one option, but I couldn't at the moment actively recommend it. I don't understand it well enough, and I am not really familiar with any alternatives. Maybe I should be, but it doesn't seem to be a burning priority. Girl in the Moon wrote a much more informative post about this than I have. Perhaps this is a Thing that I will endeavour to revisit, when the pressures of trying to get to the end of the 23 Things are over.

Which they almost are!

Only one more Thing to go, I think, and a Wordle, for some reason ...

1 comment:

  1. I'm flattered that you found my post informative. I felt like I was just writing down my confused experimentation! Zotero is definitely something that takes a bit of time to get used to, but that's at least partly, I think because it will do a lot of useful things. It's rare that there's a very simple interface for a powerful tool.

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