pf-dspace blog now Zotero (and COinS) compatible!

In our previous post I mentioned the new Zotero/Internet Archive alliance. Since I wrote that I've taken some time to understand a bit more about how Zotero works, and in particular what kinds of markup are required to make web resources "compatible" with Zotero to the extent that they can (a) be detected by the client and (b) added into a local Zotero database at the click of a button. My final step has been to tweak this blog to provide COinS metadata, after a fashion...

Some explanation is in order! After you've installed the Zotero extension to Firefox, when you travel to a site that is compatible with Zotero you will see a small icon on the right side of the address bar; the style of the icon will indicate what type of resource the plugin as detected. Click on the icon; if only one item was detected (one bundle of metadata) it will directly add the item into its local database; if more than one item was detected, it will bring up a list of all the items, and you select which ones you would like to be added. Once the item has been added, you can add addition metadata, notes, etc --- the usual Zotero features.

What's the trick? One way that Zotero "detects" a citation is by way of html SPAN elements of class="Z3988", aka the OpenURL COinS: A Convention to Embed Bibliographic Metadata in HTML standard. I use the Openly Informatics generic COinS generator, a web-based utility in which I enter some metadata and it spews out a bit of markup, which I paste at the end of my blog entry. Now when Zotero-equipped users visit my blog, they will see a collection of citations which they can selectively add to their citation lists -- which of course they will want to do!

The Zotero/Internet Archive Alliance: Now things are getting interesting!

With proposal deadlines looming early next year and the holidays rapidly approaching, the reader might have missed the big news from earlier in the week: the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive have announced a major new alliance. It has been described by Dan Cohen, director of CHNM as really a match made in heaven: a project to provide free and open source software and services for scholars joining together with the leading open library. The initiative is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has supported earlier Zotero development.

Some of the language in the Chronicle article has caused concern in the library and IR community, especially that this alliance is meant to bypass the library. In her Library2.0 blog Laura Cohen does a great job summarizing these concerns in an entry entitled Zotero Commons: Who Needs Libraries? Note that the follow-up comments to her entry, including some from Dan Cohen himself, are superb.

In addition to his comments in Library2.0, Dan posted an entry in his blog yesterday responding to two misconceptions about the Zotero/IA alliance, that (1) the scope of the Zotero+IA alliance is limited to the Zotero Commons (it's not), and (2) that the Zotero+IA alliance is an end-run around institutional repositories (it's not intended to be). He goes on to say that he wants to ...emphasize that this project does not make IA the exclusive back end for contributions. Indeed, I am aware of several libraries that are already experimenting with using Zotero as an input device for institutional repositories...

There are elements of functionality (proposed or existing today) that we think are exciting, especially various features that will potentially contribute to collaboration between researchers and the care and feeding of scholarly networks. But there are also some fundamental issues incarnate with the sharing of research materials that even a clever initiative like Zotero+IA cannot solve...it's nearly Christmas, so I won't use that other nine-letter word beginning with 'C' (cue Boris Karloff)...