Brand New User needs help organizing what she already has

radiokellia
I just downloaded Zotero for Firefox on Windows. I already have research, draft chapters of my book, PDFs etc on my computer. How do I get them into Zotero? I am hoping not to have to go back to the sources and make new copies.
  • adamsmith
    That's not enough details to provide you with a useful answer. What exactly are you trying to do? What do you have? E.g. did you use any other reference manager before? In that case, see here:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/getting_stuff_into_your_library#importing_from_other_tools

    If not, see here:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/retrieve_pdf_metadata

    If those don't answer your questions, please take some more time to outline what you're trying to do.
  • radiokellia
    I've never had a reference manager before. I am just trying to organize things into folders on windows explorer So say I have Chapter 1 of the Book, that covers Topic A, I have what I have written on Topic A plus PDFS of articles I found on the 'Net related to Topic A, etc.

    I also have folders called Books to read,Audio to listen to and Video to see. I either have the actual books (e books) or A/V files or citations to them that I typed out in Word or Open Office. (Whi9ch one I use depends on whether I am using my voice recognition software or not.

    But when I see an article on the Web, it is tedious to go through the tree and find the right folder to put it in, which is why I am going to try Zotero. But I am wondering what to do with the information I have already gathered.
  • fbennett
    edited April 29, 2012
    I'm afraid you will have to reconstruct the hierarchy manually in Zotero. A computer's folders and files are like cardboard boxes and scratch paper; they aren't designed to provide the sort of structured metadata that drives a reference manager.

    The first step would be to get the content items into My Library in Zotero. For PDFs, the link provided by adamsmith above may be helpful. For things available on the Web, you can fetch the details into Zotero from JSTOR or Google Books or whatever. For other content, you will need to add the item details by hand.

    Once you have all of your content in place, you can reconstruct your hierarchy of folders as Zotero collections, and add the relevant items to each with drag and drop. There isn't an easier way, unfortunately, but once you have the content in this form, it becomes more portable to other systems.
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