Upgrade Storagereview of zotero, comparison w/ endnote
so i d/led and tried out zotero just now. it is the largest firefox add-on ive ever tried. it makes me worry about bloat and load times, although i havent really tested it yet to see how it affects this. and i likely will never do so, since i am uninstalling it on next startup. why? endnote is better.. for me, at least. it might be a 'dated' interface or whatever. but i like it being separate than my browser and how quickly it searches and parses library collections. it is just straight up faster. AND i can type in incomplete author and title names and it still gets the goods. for example: in endnote i type in 'baudr' for author and 'consu' in title. it properly identifies this as baudrillard, 'the consumer society'. zotero, on the other hand, is dependent on the library website-- which does NOT find the book when i use this same partial word search. all around, zotero just feels more clumsy and bulky. the firefox integration is pointless, imo.
but endnote is still not the ideal solution that i am looking for, which is what brought me here in the first place. one thing that would be REALLY GREAT is if one of these applications were able to take the cards and not only 'attach' a file to them (pdf, doc, etc) but actually RENAME the file according to a string like 'author, title. year publisher'. and EVEN BETTER would be if it could write the keywords as metadata to the file. and all of this in quick, one-click, batch operations.
this is especially useful for sites like JSTOR, which (as far as i can tell) do not automatically name their article downloads. i have a massive folder of pdfs of the type 0(1).pdf, 0(2).pdf...
going through them individually is a complete time-waster.
but endnote is still not the ideal solution that i am looking for, which is what brought me here in the first place. one thing that would be REALLY GREAT is if one of these applications were able to take the cards and not only 'attach' a file to them (pdf, doc, etc) but actually RENAME the file according to a string like 'author, title. year publisher'. and EVEN BETTER would be if it could write the keywords as metadata to the file. and all of this in quick, one-click, batch operations.
this is especially useful for sites like JSTOR, which (as far as i can tell) do not automatically name their article downloads. i have a massive folder of pdfs of the type 0(1).pdf, 0(2).pdf...
going through them individually is a complete time-waster.
I have reasonably good sized personal research collection (1500 biblio items, 2000 items total, 300 PDFs) and I don't' notice any Firefox startup time issues, even on lower spec computers. Zotero doesn't load the database into memory until you actually use it, so it feels pretty light, but if browser integration isn't your thing anyway, it may not matter. Zotero isn't the fastest when it comes to tagging and adding items to collections when it is dealing with large libraries. But the devs are aware of this, and have plans to improve the situation. (Firefox 3 in particular may enable some improvement).
I guess you've tried out Zotero's auto-tag functionality (which I have disabled, since I like to have more control over my metadata).
However Zotero does auto-rename PDFs from JSTOR and other places--quite handily in my opinion. Just the actual attached files however, not the child item in Zotero's database, so you have to select "show file" to see the change. You can even customize the renaming, though I find LastnameDATE-Title just fine.
The way that Zotero captures full-text-searchable, auto-renamed, PDFs from JSTOR in a single click (or less if you capture multiple items from a single search result), and makes these associated with their biblio-data info is one of the best parts about the program.
does the auto-tagging write metadata to the actual pdf? that would be great. i didnt see how to do this.
how can you auto-rename pdfs that were already d/led?
No, Zotero doesn't change any embedded metadata within the PDF itself.
If you store the PDFs as snapshots (the default when you download them automatically from JSTOR), Zotero keeps them internally in its data directory. Here, it isn't an absolute link that Zotero uses to them. You can copy your whole zotero data directory somewhere else on the system (or to a flash or network drive) and it works just fine. You can't move the PDFs easily from here, (as far as I know) since zotero's snapshots need to be kept in the zotero data directory. (their locations are tied to Zotero's database). You'd have to change them (I think) from a snapshot to a link, and then, yes, you would presumably have an absolute path.
At the moment it does work best for me to just throw all my PDFs at Zotero and let it keep them internally. But that does make it a little trickier for other programs to find them, since the directories in Zotero's storage directory are all numbered. I don't really need any external access to them, so this is not an issue for me.
Hmm, renaming doesn't work. You are checking the actual filename and not just the zotero name for the attachment? (i.e. selecting the "show file.." button within Zotero)?
I don't know why a single item from your library wouldn't' show up after several minutes. It's a bit random, and a problem I've never had. You've had success at other libraries, I suppose? loc.gov, or copac.ac.uk? You can import from JSTOR? Do you know others who get it to work at your library?
Best of luck
> * CommentAuthormcgillicuddy
> * CommentTimeMar 3rd 2008
>
>
> I have never used endnote, but I think that Zotero is superior to
> refworks. With refworks you need to be online, and once I graduate I
> would have to pay for it. Zotero makes it easier to cite webpages, and
> easier to cite books with one click on amazon and some libraries. My
> biggest gripes is the workarounds I had to use to work on two different
> computers (though I know you're working on it) and that it doesn't
> recognize my school's library (university of British Columbia). I think
> this is a great program and I wouldn't go back to refworks even if it
> were free.
If you're willing to switch to OpenOffice (OO) you can install it on a
flash drive along with Firefox. Add the relevant extensions and you have
a windows Zotero environment on a stick. See portableapps.com for stick
versions of Firefox and OO.
There is a cheap note-taking software called NoteScribe that you might be interested in. You can rename the attached files to whatever you want, and tag all notes with keywords, if that is what you're referring to.
Check it out: www.notescribe.net for a free trial