Suggestions on Handout for Web Library Interface

jowellsatiusb
I recently made a handout to explain the new Web Library interface for my students.

It's in a Google Doc. Read only, CC-BY-SA.

Suggestions in this discussion very welcome

https://docs.google.com/document/d/113-Izz9NO9M4jHllplc7sjMgxARfL1q4rdzg34AqHOc/edit
  • adamsmith
    The adding items part is great. I'd probably cover a bit about organization, especially since interacting with collections is so much smoother in the new interface.
  • dstillman
    A few other suggestions:

    - Consider putting manual editing after automatic, since automatic should always be the preferred, normal option. We never mention manual adding first.

    - "Dragging and dropping items between Zotero folders copies items so they exist in both the source and destination folders." They're "collections", not "folders" — the latter implies behavior that doesn't apply. And, along with that, dragging doesn't really "copy" items. It simply adds them to the target collection, while keeping them in the original collection. We usually make the comparison to photo albums or music playlists.

    - Don't say "uniform resource identifier". URLs are URIs, but that's a complicated technical thing that no one needs to know about, and the other identifiers aren't actually URIs. I would just say that it takes URLs (or "web addresses", even) and identifiers such as ISBNs and DOIs.
  • jowellsatiusb
    adamsmith: thanks, organization would be a good next section, maybe I'll do that to clean up the drag/drop language as noted below

    dstillman: thanks!
    1. I put manual editing first because I introduce this material in class and want them to think about manual bibliographic construction first, using critical thinking skills to consider what information is important in a reference

    2. Collections v Folders. Good points, I'll see what I can do.

    3. Point taken, but I need some noun that encompasses all the items that go in the "Add by Identifier" box ... I guess I could just write "identifier" instead
  • bwiernik
    I would also suggest not doing manual data entry first. When I teach Zotero, I do the point you are thinking about by emphasizing that after importing an item using the Zotero browser connector, you need to carefully look at the imported data and determine if it’s accurate, then make any manual edits. I cover not only adding missing data, but also adjusting capitalization, completing author names that are just initials, adding editors for book chapters if missing, etc.
  • jowellsatiusb
    Hi bweirnik, thank you, I understand your point. However, I use this handout and its predecessors most often to teach freshmen and sophomores citation management from the ground up.

    The first step is disabusing them of the idea that "bibliographies are to avoid plagiarism" by explaining how a bibliographic entry functions as an intelligent key for a reader to go find the source information and not just verify it but reuse it.

    To to this, I have them build some Zotero entries for journal articles manually in class so that they understand their abilities and responsibilities to know which fields should be filled and how, and they can use the title, year, page fields to find the item just like people did pre-Internet.

    After the students have built and shared references, my next step is to teach them identifier scraping and editing from JSTOR or similar. Experience has shown me that without preparatory work they treat it as a magic button without any critical thought and they simply don't consider how to edit the scraped metadata. They have learned these bad behaviors from BibMe and CiteULike and have rarely given a citation or complete bibliography a second thought beyond copying from those sites.

  • adamsmith
    3. Point taken, but I need some noun that encompasses all the items that go in the "Add by Identifier" box ... I guess I could just write "identifier" instead
    Yes, I'd use identifier. URIs, precisely defined, would include the schema, whereas Zotero expects identifiers like ISBN, DOI, and PMID without any schema information
  • dstillman
    Experience has shown me that without preparatory work they treat it as a magic button without any critical thought and they simply don't consider how to edit the scraped metadata.
    I would still urge you to make clear that, in real-world use, they should always try to add items automatically and then be sure to edit later. Encouraging manual entry would be a true disservice. Because ultimately, it should be a magic button, and the fact that it's not is a technical limitation that will hopefully lessen with time. There's no value in real researchers doing laborious manual entry of metadata that's already available in digital form.
  • jowellsatiusb
    No worries, I have a whole magic show where I talk to them about "how hard and painful bibliographies are" while I drag and drop a whole Chicago MoS bibliography into a Google Doc on the screen.

    But as a long time user myself, as an almost cult-like evangelist of Z to my colleagues, and as a teacher who requires most of his classes to to learn Zotero use, I know there are lots of metadata discrepancies out there. It is a magic button, but like any magic spell if you don't use it precisely there could be dire consequences ;-)
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