If you’ve ever used Zotero to create a citation, you’ve benefited from the talents of the indefatigable Frank Bennett, law professor at Nagoya University in Japan. Below is our spotlight interview with Frank, lead developer of the citation engine that powers Zotero’s citation and bibliography functionality.

Name and Occupation:
Frank Bennett, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Nagoya University.

How long have you been using Zotero?
Since December of 2008, so about two and a half years.

What got you interested in developing for Zotero?
Zotero was among the tools I reviewed during a trawl for software to recommend to postgraduate candidates, and it was immediately clear that this was one to run with. The system is a nearly perfect fit for our needs.

Many of our students hail from countries in East and Central Asia, so open source design and community development were big attractions: there is not much point in training students on proprietary tools to which they may lose access after graduation. The architecture is also a good fit: Internet access from some countries in this region can be rather problematic, and that makes it particularly important to have a self-contained local image of the library on the user’s own PC.

Zotero lacked a number of features needed for legal writing, and Asian language support (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) was not yet there. I have a tendency to tinker on things anyway, but those particular feature sets have been my main excuse for meddling in the project.

What kind of development have you done so far for Zotero?
The main things I’ve done are the CSL processor that Zotero 2.1 uses to format references (citeproc-js), and the multilingual branch of Zotero (MLZ), which several of us hope to see in production one day down the road. Both projects have been great experiences.

Zotero development benefits from an amazing range of expertise among its contributors, and the core team’s insistence on standards-based solutions has a very positive ripple effect across the community. In addition to input from CSL designers Bruce D’Arcus and Rintze Zelle, citeproc-js has been kept in line by numerous commenters, ranging from members of the core team, through Zotero contributors and users, to developers working in entirely separate CSL-related projects. The feedback really has been invaluable.

Early adoption of MLZ by Avram Lyon and Stephan de Spiegeleire’s team at The Hague Center for Strategic Studies moved the development goalposts much faster than would otherwise have been the case. There is plenty left to be done for multilingual, but it is largely thanks to Avram and others that the path forward is clearly in our sights.

Anything cool planned for the future?
I’m looking at producing a legal research and writing guide for Zotero, aimed at law students, to provide consistent guidelines for handling a variety of legal sources. With coordinated development of the main legal styles, it should tie in nicely with some important legal metadata initiatives underway within the free access to law communities of Europe and North America. It’s nice to see things falling into place, and I’m pretty confident that we will be able to offer improved legal referencing support in Zotero in the reasonably near future.

His nickname “adamsmith” may ring a bell to Zotero community developers, political scientists, or anyone who has had citation style questions on the forums. Zotero interviews Sebastian Karcher and in doing so learns his motivation for authoring citation styles, translators, and why he chose the name of a famous Capitalist as the pseudonym for his open source work.

Name and Occupation:
Sebastian Karcher
Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, Northwestern University

How long have you been using Zotero?
Since late 2007 – I switched to Linux then and was looking for a new reference management system. I had used Biblioscape before, but I’ve never looked back.

What got you interested in developing for Zotero?
I really wasn’t initially – I’m not much of a programmer, to be honest. I first just wanted to learn to make simple changes to Zotero citation styles. I then got more involved in style development – which is really pretty basic and doesn’t require much coding experience. What kept me interested was, first, the possibility of learning new things – on the way I picked up on some shell scripting, using version control systems (like SVN and git), regular expressions, XPath, now some JavaScript. I would have never gotten myself to learn any of this without a specific purpose.

The other thing that motivates me is more political. I think it’s important to do our best to keep our tools and data free and open. To me Zotero is part of such an effort.

What development activities have you done so far for Zotero?
A lot of my work has been in style development – I’ve probably had some hand in about half of the ~370 independent styles in the Zotero style repository. We’re also thankfully getting more and more styles submitted by users; when a user posts a style for sharing I’ll usually be the one to briefly review it and then commit it to the csl repository. I also try to come by the forum a couple of times a day to see if there are any user questions I can answer.

More recently, I’ve been starting to work a little on Zotero translators, which has become much easier since Erik Hetzner wrote a framework that essentially reduces the task of writing a translator to identifying the relevant XPath.

Anything else you’d like to add? Cool things planned for the future?
As a political scientist I wanted to get translators for all important US magazines – a couple of them – like The New Yorker and Washington Monthly are already in the 2.1.8 version of Zotero, a couple of new ones – New Republic, Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, Slate – are in the queue – so that’s mostly done. I’m also interested in getting translators for more of the databases in Latin America, a region I do a lot of my work on.

On another note: People on the Forum often wonder about my username “adamsmith”; Why would the “Father of Capitalism” – Adam Smith – contribute to an open source project? The reason I’m so fond of Adam Smith is that he is so profoundly misunderstood. Smith actually believed that people were motivated not just by self interest, but also by “fellow feeling” – here’s one of my favorite quotes: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” There is even an entire blog dedicated to debunking misconceptions about Smith, of which there are many.

If you follow Zotero on Twitter, Jason Puckett‘s name may already be familiar to you. Below is our inaugural Spotlight interview with Jason, Zotero evangelist and author of a new book on Zotero published this month.

Name and Occupation:
Jason Puckett, Communication Librarian, Georgia State University.

How long have you been using Zotero?
For about five years now. I used to teach and use Endnote, but tried out Zotero while in library school and quickly became a convert.

How do you teach and promote Zotero?
Basically, I’m the point of first contact for anyone at GSU who needs help learning Zotero. I teach regular in-person workshops during the academic year. I usually include at least a brief Zotero segment in most of my regular course-based information literacy classes. I’ve taught online workshops using Elluminate and other presentation software, for GSU and as a guest speaker for other institutions. I’ve also taught a four-week online continuing education course for librarians for Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science, using Moodle.

What are some projects you’ve done using Zotero?
I’m the author of the new book Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Educators from ACRL Publications. It goes into the basic and advanced functionality of Zotero, and even has some information on including feeds in third party apps. Additionally, at GSU Library we recently used a Zotero group to allow several people to work together compiling a bibliography of faculty publications. I’m using it collaboratively to pool sources with an article co-author. And naturally, I’ve used it for every article, bibliography and publication list I’ve created in the last few years.

Anything planned for the future?
Nothing definite, aside from the paper I’m researching right now. I’m excited to see what happens as the new API allows Zotero to connect with other applications. I’m already trying out the Zotpress plugin on my WordPress site, and it’s working great so far. I’m thinking about a possible digital exhibit I’d like to put together this summer, partly inspired by the New Orleans Research Collaborative site, and I’d certainly use Zotero to build the bibliographies for that.

A new third-party plugin called Zotpress is now available. It runs on WordPress, the open source platform widely used for personal, professional and course websites and blogs. Zotpress was created by community member Katie Seaborn, and it allows you to pull and organize items from your or another Zotero library into your WordPress site. The plugin harnesses the power of Zotero’s server API by grabbing library data dynamically and presenting it outside Zotero.

So why would you use it? Zotpress is great for scholars or job hunters who want to easily organize their CVs or resumes on their personal websites. Teachers can use it as well to present bibliographies to students. Or, if you just want to share some stuff you’ve been reading or studying, you can use Zotpress for that, too. In short, Zotpress is useful because it expands on Zotero’s mission by offering a new and easy interface to share your data freely with the world.

Zotpress has already been downloaded over a thousand times, but please note that it is still under active development, which means you may run into some glitches that will soon be resolved. To download Zotpress or for more information, visit the WordPress plugin directory.