Zotero is one of the most remarkable bits of free technology out there, in my view. For anyone who’s ever had to create a bibliography, it saves hours and hours, as well as being a great way to keep track of anything – your books, video collection, web links and so on. I’ve been an Endnote user for years, so have been a bit lazy in getting my head round Zotero, but now I’m teaching a course where I’m introducing students to it, so I’m working probably as hard as they are to stay a step ahead.
The thing that I really like about Zotero is the way that certain sites – Amazon is one – have a little icon appear in the RH end of the address bar that you can click in order to create a bibliography entry in Zotero from the item you’re looking at. It works on library catalogues brilliantly. In fact, it’s so clever, it’s a bit disappointing when a site doesn’t have this facility available, and you have to click the button inside Zotero instead.
Thanks to The Chronicle of Higher Education, I’ve now discovered the secret of Making your WordPress blog Zotero enabled. It’s all down to a little plug-in for Word Press called Scholar Press Coins. Now, fair enough, I can’t think why anyone would want to create Zotero entries for some of the nonsense I populate this site with, but you never know. It’s the fact that you could if you wanted to that I think is really, really cool.
You might try the UnAPI plugin. It gives the post summary and other data:
http://lackoftalent.org/michael/blog/unapi-wordpress-plug-in/
Thanks for the tip – forgive my ignorance, but will there be any conflicts with Zotero if I install the UnAPI as well as COinS? Will it choke on information overload, or do they do different things?
Zotero will prefer unAPI to COinS. And, by the way, I’m not seeing a scrape icon on this page. I’m using the unAPI plugin at my wife’s blog– see e.g., http://www.gimranov.com/wp/2010/10/752/ — and it has worked quite well.
Wow – you were dead right. This seems much better than COinS, not least because it can read the homepage as a folder and give me a drop down list to pick from – which COinS didn’t. Thank you so much for the tip.
Incidentally, I got the COinS link from this post from http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/making-your-wordpress-blog-zotero-enabled/22598 – I’m sure many other people would be grateful for the info.