Upgrade StorageBMG Geneva translator — and Zotero with primary-school pupils
Hi @adamsmith — a blast from the past. Back in 2011, in the "New libraries requested” thread (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/108550#Comment_108550), you wrote the AMICUS translator after I had tracked down some technical information from Library and Archives Canada, and I tested it for you.
Fifteen years later I've somehow ended up on the other side of the process. I've just submitted a translator for the Bibliothèques municipales de Genève: PR #3660 (https://github.com/zotero/translators/pull/3660). It retrieves the underlying MARCXML from the BMG catalogue and handles books, films and audio recordings, including search-result selection.
There's also a rather nice connection with Zotero adoption. I'm working with my son's primary school in Geneva, where we're introducing Zotero to the final-year pupils (roughly 11–12 years old) for their year-long individual research projects. The teachers are using shared Zotero libraries to help pupils find, collect and organise their sources.
One thing we'd like the pupils to be able to do is search the Geneva municipal library catalogue themselves and save useful books directly into their Zotero collections. Since they're working on iPads, having the BMG translator centrally distributed would make that considerably more useful than our locally installed version.
One particularly useful feature in our school context is that BMG's children's records include age recommendations (for example, “A partir de 8 ans”), which the translator preserves in Zotero. We've also realised in the course of this work how valuable BMG's existing age recommendations could be when enriching the school's own library catalogue.
I thought you might be amused by the symmetry with the AMICUS episode. I don't know whether you're still involved with translator reviews, but if you are, I'd of course be very grateful for any comments on the PR.
More generally, I'd be very interested to hear whether anyone here has experience of using Zotero with primary-school pupils. I haven't come across much discussion of Zotero being used with children this young. In particular, I'd be interested in experiences with shared/group libraries, supervised pupil access, how much of the Zotero workflow children of this age can use effectively, and also in handling children's-library metadata such as recommended ages/target audiences in Zotero.
Fifteen years later I've somehow ended up on the other side of the process. I've just submitted a translator for the Bibliothèques municipales de Genève: PR #3660 (https://github.com/zotero/translators/pull/3660). It retrieves the underlying MARCXML from the BMG catalogue and handles books, films and audio recordings, including search-result selection.
There's also a rather nice connection with Zotero adoption. I'm working with my son's primary school in Geneva, where we're introducing Zotero to the final-year pupils (roughly 11–12 years old) for their year-long individual research projects. The teachers are using shared Zotero libraries to help pupils find, collect and organise their sources.
One thing we'd like the pupils to be able to do is search the Geneva municipal library catalogue themselves and save useful books directly into their Zotero collections. Since they're working on iPads, having the BMG translator centrally distributed would make that considerably more useful than our locally installed version.
One particularly useful feature in our school context is that BMG's children's records include age recommendations (for example, “A partir de 8 ans”), which the translator preserves in Zotero. We've also realised in the course of this work how valuable BMG's existing age recommendations could be when enriching the school's own library catalogue.
I thought you might be amused by the symmetry with the AMICUS episode. I don't know whether you're still involved with translator reviews, but if you are, I'd of course be very grateful for any comments on the PR.
More generally, I'd be very interested to hear whether anyone here has experience of using Zotero with primary-school pupils. I haven't come across much discussion of Zotero being used with children this young. In particular, I'd be interested in experiences with shared/group libraries, supervised pupil access, how much of the Zotero workflow children of this age can use effectively, and also in handling children's-library metadata such as recommended ages/target audiences in Zotero.
I know a couple of folks working with Zotero at the high school level, I've never seen this discussed at the middle/elementary level. I'll say that I'm a skeptic even at the high school level -- I think there's a tendency to reward formalism over craft in secondary education and I'd much rather primary & secondary school focused on reading & writing (including analytic reading and writing) instruction over introducing software designed for academics. E.g., I just don't believe that a 14-year old kids needs to even know what a citation style is -- but otoh, if people really do find it useful in education... just please don't teach APA to high schoolers. I'm not even sure we should teach it to college students before junior or senior year.
In their final year, each pupil spends much of the year on an individual chef-d'œuvre research project. One of the things I've had in mind with Zotero is that it might help make the very notion of a source concrete: on the one hand are the sources you've found and are working from; on the other is the work you do with them — reading, taking notes, comparing, thinking and eventually writing. So the point would be precisely to help focus on the reading and writing, rather than on bibliographic formalism.
I also wonder whether the little bit of reification Zotero imposes is pedagogically useful in itself. You have to recognise that what you've found is a particular kind of source — a book, article, film, recording, interview, etc. — and that different things are pertinent to different kinds of sources: books have authors and pages; recordings have durations; interviews take place on particular dates. My thought is that beginning to distinguish and describe these objects may help them understand what a source actually is, well before there's any reason for them to care about how APA says it should be cited.
That's also the particular motivation for the BMG translator. We'd like the pupils to be able to search the Geneva public-library catalogue in preparation for actually going to the library: identify books that might be useful, save them into their project collection, and then find and use the physical books. One thing we'd very much like to avoid is implicitly teaching them that “research” means searching Google and collecting webpages.
So I think the distinction you're making between formalism and research craft is exactly the right one. Whether Zotero turns out to be a useful tool for the latter at this age is precisely what we're interested in finding out.