I’ve been using Zotero in ways which I suspect the designers didn’t think of, but I am lazy and creative when it comes to work. If you don’t know, Zotero is a Firefox plugin for managing bibliographic information in academic writing – it is an absolute gem for managing references, which are the bane of any academic writing. I however use it to file, tag and sort my research notes, and am even starting to use it to draft text.
I use my digital camera to capture all my research now – I haven’t used a pencil or a photocopy for about three years. That may sound a bit extreme to some folks, but it means everything is on the laptop, and if I go off writing up, I don’t need to lug boxes of photocopies or pages of scribbled notes. (and, yes, it is also on the external drive and on several DVDs in different locations.) I have only recently started importing it all into Zotero though.
The first image here is a digital photo from a newspaper microfilm, imported into Zotero. (Yes, you can shoot digital from old microfilm on old microfilm readers, and the quality is no worse than what you get by printing it off.) The problem is that you can’t do much with it since it is only a link to the file. You can link to files in bulk – I’ve done it, but you can’t ‘create new item from current page’ in bulk. You could Ctrl-O each file in turn and do it, but I prefer to link and then do ‘create new item..’ on each one. I was afraid that this would mean having two copies of the same image in the Zotero database, but ‘Create new item..’ appears to pull in the original file n my disk, and I can delete the linked version afterwards.
The proper, full item allows me to add all the Zotero bells and whistles to my image – full bibliographic reference, which the OpenOffice plugin will insert into my document, properly formatted. Additionally, I can add tags and notes, and even add tags to notes. In this case, I’ve used the note to write a sentence about the article which I could paste straight into my text. There are a couple of tags there as well. Since Zotero uses a common SQL compliant database, I’m sure I could knock up a query to export the notes to OpenOffice, and the day I have a lot of notes that I need moved into a draft, I will do that. However, while I use tags to sort my notes into the order I want them in for writing, I’m not sure how much I might actually use the notes feature for drafting text.
I have to look more closely at sorting and exporting based on tags. I can tag items with a date, like 19640515 or 19640512 for 15th and 12th May 1964, and when I filter the tags using 196405 the tag list will show me all the May 1964 items. (It does not work with wildcards – 196405** doesn’t work.)
There are two things I can’t do with my page images in Zotero – highlight text, obviously, and ‘Add annotation.’ I can add an annotation to a page image, but I can’t anchor it to a point on the page so that it sticks to that point regardless of how the image is zoomed or scrolled. I’d like to be able to do this, but I can live without it. However, I can see how people like art historians would find it very useful. I guess it could be done by giving each annotation an X-Y co-ordinate, expressed relative to the top right corner of the image as a percentage of image size (to allow for zooming).
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