Best workflow - books and websites

jgates2

I'm trying to convince our school to go over to Zotero from Noodletools. Z clearly wins with everything that it recognizes, and, while my citations may all come from journal articles, lots of students are using web databases and print books as well. What's the best practice for adding these citations to Zotero?

Thanks in advance!

adamsmith

Books: Zotero supports most library catalogs, including WorldCat and the Library of Congress (the latter is frequently your best option because data quality is high). You can also input books simply by pasting or typing the ISBN in the add by identifier (magic wand) field.

Web Databases: Again, Zotero supports a lot of databases just like it does with journal articles. So that'd be pretty easy. For everything else, you'll have to create a webpage item (right-click ---> Zotero --> Create New Webpage item or right click-->Zotero-->Save as Zotero Snapshot depending on the browser) and fill out the data manually.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of Zotero is that it's more powerful and will serve students longer, so they'd be teaching more lasting skills: Zotero is a popular tool among graduate students and facutly. I have not met a single doctoral student working on a dissertation with NoodeTools or EasyBib.

zuphilip

I would like to add some words about the practical workflow for printed books: I guess that the students will have to search for the books before they can read it. IMO the important step is to add these books at the same time when you decide to borrow the book from the library or click the buy button at amazon. Maybe you want to check 10 books in the library which might be interesting for your topic, then it is better to have all these entries already in zotero, because then you can also document why you only just 3 out of them to look in more details. Still the other 7 books can be moved to a seperate collection named "irrelevant-for-my-topic". Maybe one of the books is used by someone else and you have to wait for some time, before you can use it yourself. Just create a note about that in zotero. You will then find this note some weeks later when you otherwise could have forgotten which book you have to look at now.

jgates2

Being able to get resources from the library catalog seems great, but it's not working with our school's catalog: http://www.tatnall.org/libraries/online-resources/tatnall-online-catalogs/index.aspx

Any ideas on that? The icon comes up in the address bar, but clicking has no effect. I was able to get it to work fine from the Library of Congress: http://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=12495&recCount=25&recPointer=0&bibId=2582038

Thanks,
Josh

adamsmith

yeah, not a library cataloging system we support (nor are likely to in the future, unfortunately).

jgates2

It's weird that the address bar icon appears, but isn't functional. Is that common?

zuphilip

Each entry in the catalog contains "embedded metadata" and that is the reason that the symbol appears. My guess is that that metadata is somehow strange...

jgates2

I think that the snapshot + manual editing will be at least a small upgrade to NoodleTools (less to type), and at worst, it'd be equivalent. Many of the DB that students are using here aren't recognized by Zotero, so this would be a common use case for us.

For books, we're going to suggest the ISBN method. Searching in another library's catalog could work, too, but then it'll just highlight the odd non-workingness of Z with our catalog.

Thanks for the help!

adamsmith

a lot of typical high-school databases aren't well supported. They also tend to be poorly designed to work with reference managers (i.e. no export to RIS or similar formats), which means few high schools find much use for reference managers--and you've got yourself a vicious cycle.