I had never heard of Zotero before Cam23. It's an online tool for storing and sharing articles and bibliographic details.
As a part-time student I was intrigued by the possibilities of Zotero but I can't really see it being all that useful to libraries. A tool to help me get my references in order sounded great though. It only works on Firefox (which isn't the end of the world for me) and you have to download it and create an account which I did with relative ease. Once installed I saved a few pages from Amazon, LibraryThing and Google books. This was quite easy as you simply highlight the web address and click on the Zotero icon which appear in the address bar, however it took me a long time to discover how to do this. For some reason I could not get it to save any Newton records. I then had to synch my account with the web browser tool thing (sorry not to be more technical here but what would you call it??) to upload my pages to my Zotero library. How did I discover I had to do this? Sheer dumb luck!
Yes Zotero sounds like a very useful tool - if you can work out how the bloody thing works! Other than a short video (which I'm assuming has sound but I don't have speakers on my pc) there is very little information telling you what to do. This wouldn't be a problem if it was intuitive but it most certainly is not. I am not the most technically minded person in the world and this is by far the most complicated tool we've looked at so far. Now I have to work out how to delete it from my PC!
I'm sure if you're good with computers you can work this out without too much of a problem but personally I will stick to Delicious.
**Update
It's interesting to see that I seem to be in a minority of people who didn't find Zotero intuitive. Someone compared it to itunes in it's intuitiveness (is that a word?) but, whilst I agree that itunes is easy to use it still drives me up the bloody wall! I've heard internet whispers that Apple are going to replace it - I really hope they do. But I digress. I decided to give Zotero another go (maybe I had missed something) and I had a browse through the quick start guide - which actually goes on for pages and pages. Seriously, if a program needs to offer that much help then it is not a simple program to use. After a discussion over the tea table someone suggested that I didn't find it that intuitive because I'm not a cataloguer. Not having ever catalogued a book I can't comment on that but if anyone has any thoughts about that I'd love to hear them.
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could you explain more precisely which part wasn't intuitive? Also, where did you look for documentation?
ReplyDeleteZotero has ample documentation, including a concise and helpful quick-start guide:
http://www.zotero.org/support/quick_start_guide
and a whole range of screencasts
http://www.zotero.org/support/screencast_tutorials
To uninstall Zotero, use the add-ons menu item (under tools) in Firefox and click on "uninstall" next to Zotero.
This won't remove the Zotero data folder from your hard-disc - you'll need to delete it manually.
I found the whole program infuriatingly complicated. I'm sure someone who is more computer savvy wouldn't have a problem with it but I prefer a program where half an hour playing around with it will teach you most of the basics. After I'd spent half an hour on Zotero I was still none the wiser. Having now looked at the 'quick-start' guide my first observation is that it's not that quick - pages and pages of things to look through! I'll continue to use Delicious which I managed to figure out in five minutes. I'm sure many people find Zotero invaluable but it's just not for me.
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