Help Zotero win Citefest competition

adamsmith
I'll be competing for Zotero in a citation tool match-up.
http://citefest.pbwiki.com/
They have provided us with the tasks we'll have to fulfill in advance, most of them are no problem, here are the ones that I don't know how to do effectively.
Suggestions? my comments of what my best guesses are in square brackets.

11. You should now have 19 references in your personal library. Attach the keyword “Citefest” to all references in your citation library
[of course I can do that all by hand, but there must be a faster way?]


14. Create a custom style and format all your citations in this style. Start with APA, MLA or Chicago style and include the word “CITEFEST” at the end of each formatted citation. Create a bibliography with all 19 references in this custom style.
[no idea there - note that we're under heavy time constraints - about 10 min for 5 different tasks]

19. Merge documents 1 and 2 into a single document with all citations and works cited in correct order.
[not sure - will that turn into a problem?]

20. Send the final document to a different computer. Harvest the citations from the document into your citation tool.
[I don't think that's possible with Zotero - correct?]
  • sean
    edited February 27, 2008
    11. If you already have a Citefest tag, you can drag all 19 references to the Citefest tag in the tag selector.

    14. You can play around with CSLs by entering chrome://zotero/content/tools/csledit.xul in the Firefox location bar. You'll basically want to add the following line to the end of the citation and bibliography entries for something like APA:
    <text value = " CITEFEST"/>
    You'll also want to change the citation title and id tags to something like "Citefest" and "http://www.zotero.org/styles/citefest"
    We don't yet support saving the new style directly from this interface, so go ahead and copy all text into a text file and save as citefest.csl. Then drag this file back to the Firefox window and it will import. Right-click your collection of 19 references, select "Create Bibliography from Collection..." and choose your newly created Citefest style.

    19. Will not be a problem. Just copy text from both docs into a new document and click the refresh button in the Zotero Word toolbar.

    20. That is correct. We will support syncing of Zotero libraries among machines in the very near future, which will enable document portability, but at this time we do not.
  • bdarcus
    edited February 27, 2008
    20. That is correct. We will support syncing of Zotero libraries among machines in the very near future, which will enable document portability, but at this time we do not.
    Although ... this isn't an adequate long-term solution, since it still depends on access to a particular application. and a particular database instance.
  • adamsmith
    thanks, that will help - I'll try to get the citation style working,
    the tag drag&drop is great - I didn't know that.
  • scot
    20. Send the final document to a different computer. Harvest the citations from the document into your citation tool.
    And what if that final document contained a second bibliography that you had dragged from Zotero (all 19 items) with the Copy as HTML preference checked? What if you transferred your final document to another computer having first saved it as a single page .html document. Word seems to keep the COinS tags intact, and they the references could presumably be slurped into Zotero on the other end. But only if you can force Zotero to look for them. You can load the page into firefox easily enough, but Zotero seems to not search for COinS tags except from URLs it expects to have them. I don't know if this can be overcome. I couldn't do this last step.

    If you needed to, you could possibly mark this second bibliography as 'hidden' within Word/OOo.

    Anyway, it is a bit of a hack, and not exactly what they intended, but the mechanism (embedding metadata in the document) is the same.

    Otherwise you can export your bibliography to Zotero RDF, zip the folder, drag it into a Word document where it will stay. You can then unzip it on the other end and import into Zotero. Again, probably not what they intended....
  • adamsmith
    edited February 27, 2008
    OK, I got the citefest citation working - fortunately this is an easy change, so it's just one line towards the bottom of the screen.

    about
    "Otherwise you can export your bibliography to Zotero RDF, zip the folder, drag it into a Word document where it will stay. You can then unzip it on the other end and import into Zotero. Again, probably not what they intended...."

    maybe a dumb question but I had no idea that was possible with word - doesn't seem to work with OOo. I have the zipped Zotero RDF, but then what?
    Can you explain?
  • scot
    On windows, just drag the zip file into the open word processor document. I had no idea it was possible either until I tried it. It seems that the (Word) document holds the zip file like a container (at any rate the document's file size expands by the size of the .zip file). I didn't try dragging it out on another computer, though.
  • adamsmith
    just a quick thank you for the help - Zotero did win the competition, leaving behind endnote and refworks. :-)
  • bdarcus
    Cool. Is there a summary of results/announcement somewhere?
  • adamsmith
    It will be published on the wiki cited above, I don't know when yet (I'm not part of the library team who put the whole challenge up, so I have no influence).

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