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#access2009pei – Gwendolyn MacNairn – Zotero: A better way to go?
3 Oct 09
One of the first things we do with new students on the reference/IL side is introduce digital scholarship resources/tools. Academic integrity issues need to be intrduced, always seems heavy handed “policing” orientation. Stress importance of recording evidence for future use, but the part they always remember is the fear of being charged with plagiarism. Details matter for coding, but not for writing. The need to create an accurate, complete list of references is daunting. GM’s students are mostly Masters in computer science, often don’t want to admit publicly that this is a problem for them, lots of office visits.
How do students organize the information they’ve collected so they know exactly what they have and where they got it? Bibliographics tools: Endnote, ProCite, RefWorks, Zotero. Show of hands, RefWorks #1 in this crowd. In GM’s experience at Dalhousie RefWorks has very little uptake by students. Too many clicks, file folders, formats, etc. Students get bogged down, want something more intuitive.
Zotero a “personal research assistant inside your browser” (quoted whom?). Z has a growing list of significant institutions that support.
Used 10 Comp sci grad student volunteers, already using Firefox, Zotero a simple plug in. Sent them to the quick start guide, then gave them a research activity: pick a topic, find and zotero 4 relevant resources: scholarly article, PDF doc, blog post, and YouTube vid. Demonstrated the activity to them individually hoping to ensure consistency.
Zotero has “iTunes style interface”: Students had a completely different reaction to this compared to RefWorks. Collections > Items > Details. If desired, can take a snapshot of a page, in case you wish to consult later after it’s changed. Zotero will pull subject headings from indexes into tags. Final stage of the process was to generate APA style works list and analyse how well Zotero did the job. How well does the scraping work? GM felt not that well, but student’s felt results were good enough–no interest in editing field contents to make them right.
What do students do?
– save a lot of PDFs, creating a personal digital library, usually spread over many folders, but not really logically organized. The one thing they all saw as being of value was Zotero’s ability to store and identify PDFs in a logical way
– initial comments: easy to use, better way to manage and interact with PDF, liked that it was open source
– three months later: really glad to have the snapshots, one said they were using it for ALL research assignments, other nine said using it informally but didn’t see it as a useful research tool. Several commented that if they had an IEEE output they would use it more (IEEE has since been added in V2).
Who owns style files? They’re not reducing in number! Students go crazy trying to match styles, why do we continue to support them? Endnote supports 3000+ styles; many students don’t even know what they are. A movement is needed to reduce the number of styles out there!
– a lawsuit over the ownership of style files was launched. Endnote .ens files are proprietary conversion files; Zotero uses .csl (citation style language). George Mason University encouraged students, if Endnote wasn’t meeting they’re needs, to export their citations to Zotero. Thomson-Reuters sued: the E site license contains clauses that prohibit the reverse-engineering of software, basically claiming style files as intellectual property. At the end of 2008 GMU didn’t renew it’s site license. The case was dismissed in June 2009 [due to a lack of jurisdiction]
Meanwhile, V2 beta was released in May 2009 with so many improvements GM feels her research needs to start all over again. Strongly encourages us to try using it. Zotero encourages the same type of OS community involvement as others we have looked at. Zotero is different because we’re not in the middle: if a student wants to use it, they just plug it in (but they have to do it themselves). Librarian colleagues seem less interested in learning about Z because it’s not a university-licensed product. So GM’s world includes two products: RefWorks, and Zotero; like two worlds that don’t overlap.
Z is free, computer-based, firefox only; RW licensed, web-based, works in all browserw
Z works well with flickr, youtube, factiva (but nto ISI), web sites, OpenOffice (MS Word is there, will improve); RW scholarly journals, ISI (but not factiva) web sites, MS Word
V2 of Z has a USB portable option, which facilitates training sessions, can use on imaged public machines, can take library from one computer to another.
Vertov and BiblioBouts examples of library-oriented development that sits on top of Z. BB is a game; Vertov enhances description of media sources.
Posted by pzed on October 3, 2009 at 9.50am
Categories: access 2009, conferences, libraries, twitter
Comments on "#access2009pei – Gwendolyn MacNairn – Zotero: A better way to go?"
For the record, a couple of minor corrections. First, Zotero uses CSL (Citation Style Language) styles. Second, this is incorrect:
The case was dismissed in June 2009; the decision states that the reverse engineering of data files is not the same as the reverse engineering of software!
The judge dismissed the case on a technicality that had nothing to do with the substance.
Posted by Bruce on October 3, 2009 at 6.54pm :: link
Thanks Bruce, I’ve corrected both.
Posted by pzed on October 3, 2009 at 7.35pm :: link
