Archive for April, 2007

This Tuesday, May 1st, from 9:30-10:30 a.m., George Washington University’s American Studies Department is hosting an Introduction to Zotero workshop. The workshop will be held on the second floor of the American Studies building at 2108 G St. Space is limited, so if you would like to attend the workshop please email trevor@zotero.org.

For Zotero enthusiasts on the West Coast, this Thursday Dan Cohen will talk about Zotero and digital research at the Stanford Humanities Center from 1-3 p.m. The presentation will be held in room 121A Green Library.

The servers at the Center for History and New Media will again be down for scheduled maintenance on Sunday, April 29 starting at 7:30 am EDT. Service should be restored by 10 am EDT at the very latest. These service updates will affect all CHNM sites, including www.zotero.org. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

The servers at the Center for History and New Media will be down for scheduled maintenance on Sunday, April 22 starting at 8 am EDT and lasting from 4-12 hours (we hope no more than 6 hours). These service updates will affect all CHNM sites, including www.zotero.org. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

We are pleased to announce that Zotero users can now automatically grab references mentioned in Wikipedia using the popular online encyclopedia’s native citation format. The release of Zotero 1.0 Beta 4 also includes Wikipedia Citation Templates as a new export format to add references into Wikipedia. To easily copy and paste formatted citations into Wikipedia, you can use the new “Quick Copy” feature: first, specify Wikipedia as the output style by clicking the gear icon above the left pane of your Zotero window, choosing “Preferences,” and selecting “Wikipedia Citation Templates” from the pull-down menu under the “Export” tab. Next select individual references or collections in your Zotero library, press the copy keystroke (default Cmd-Shift-C or Ctrl-Alt-C), and paste the contents of the clipboard into the source code of a Wikipedia article.

By incorporating print-based references in Wikipedia articles, users help to bring offline resources into new relationships with online resources. Moreover, because the Wikipedia citation templates for books and articles embed COinS tags in each bibliographic entry (see, for example, the Wikipedia article for “Amphibian“), users can not only export Zotero references into Wikipedia, they can also import Wikipedia references into Zotero. This read/write relationship promises to allow information to better circulate through various scholarly communication networks.

To demonstrate the new Wikipedia style export feature, CHNM’s Trevor Owens has added a list of references to the Wikipedia article for MIT media scholar Henry Jenkins by automatically importing the relevant bibliographic metadata from the Library of Congress online catalog into his Zotero library and exporting it as formatted citations into Wikipedia. These citations can in turn be ingested into the libraries of other Zotero users consulting the article.