Musicology needs Zotero!

hartmanla · January 19, 2008

I love this app! What a great contrast to the constant frustrations with EndNote.

I'd love it if Zotero could work with RILM--the journal storage site for musicology and ethnomusicology. I could convert all of my colleagues if they could simply click on the icon to compile journal sources.

Keep up the good work!

dchapii · February 7, 2008

I couldn't agree more! I'm a musicology graduate student who uses Zotero all the time. I tried to get a colleague turned on to the program, but when they tried to use it with RILM it compressed all the data into the Notes field. They decided not to use Zotero because it didn't work with RILM, since it's such a key database for us. This is a pretty important one for us music academics (theorists and perfomers too!). I wish I knew more about contributing to the project, or else I would help create the filter myself.

(If anyone wants to take on this project, the database is called RILM Abstracts of Music and is currently hosted by OCLC. It probably wouldn't take much work at all to alter an already existing OCLC filter to work with this database!)

Tjowens · February 8, 2008

I think there might be several ways to access the RILM Abstracts of Music database. I just pulled things in to Zotero from RILM through OVID without a hitch, you might check to see if you can access the database through them.

mikowitz · February 8, 2008

To second the above comment, if your institution has access to any of the host sites listed at the bottom of RILM's "about" page (http://www.rilm.org/about.html), then you can use those to access the RILM Abstracts of Music.

dchapii · February 9, 2008

That's great info actually. That sounds like it would be an excellent work-around. Unfortunately, the last two graduate schools I've attended only subscribe to RILM via OCLC. I would need an OCLC-flavored RILM filter in order to populate my Zotero folders without copy=pasting all the content from the notes field.

There is another work around, and that is to select citations in OCLC and export them to an Endnote format. That can be imported into Zotero fairly easily. (I do that with the International Index to Music Periodicals [IIMP, a.k.a. the OTHER essential musicology database] as well.)