ZoteroA Guide to...

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What Is Zotero?Pronounciation: Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh]

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sourc-es, available for Firefox, Chrome or Safari. It works right where you do your work—in the web browser itself. This powerful research tool will enhance your studies at UAL, especially when you have to write essays, reports and dissertations, which can be a nightmare by the time it gets to creating the bibliography.

See how much easier your life will become with Zotero.

Why Use Zotero?Technology is moving the way you study forward. You probably still write all your thoughts, quotes and bibliography sources with good old pen and paper. Your notes may be often lost, untidy and make no sense at all. Zotero is here to save the day, eliminating all of this and keeping everything in one place for your future reference. Here are some great reasons for using Zotero:

• Zotero collection - As you’re trawling through millions of websites, you’re probably not noting all the important information. You can save bibliographic information into your Zotero collection quick-ly, easily and efficiently from a large variety of websites including popular sites such as Amazon, Flickr, and even Youtube.

• Easy-to-use interface - Zotero’s simple interface ensures that you can do everything easily and without effort. For the technophobes amongst us, this is a particularly user-friendly feature.

• Categorize and manage data for your reports, essays and projects - Zotero is like your digital li-brary, that you can sort out just the way you want. Perhaps you’re doing a variety of modules all at once? The data that you find for all of these projects can be organized into folders so that you can refer back to them easily using the search function.

• Grab information from texts - Not only can you highlight bibliographical information but you can also index information. This means that you can also search within articles and pieces of informa-tion.

• Annotations - As fashion students all know, annotating images, data, quotes is key to a success-ful project. You can write unlimited notes with in your archive, ensuring you never lose a thought.

• Zotero can type your bibliography for you - Select what you want to insert into your bibliography and hey presto, all the relevant information is there. Choose from a variety of styles, however at UAL you must use the Harvard Referencing style.

How Do I Use Zotero?Zotero is an extension of Firefox the internet browser. You must ensure that you have this already installed onto your computer before you install Zotero. You can download Zotero from their web-site:

Go the Zotero website at: http://www.zotero.org

What operating system?

Zotero works on a variety of different browsers: Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Mac, Linux or Win-dows, as long as you have one of these browsers you’ll be able to get Zotero. For more informa-tion on system requirements, go to their website where there is a support section. Zotero is preinstalled on Firefox on the UAL network. Follow the steps below for a quick star guide.

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1. Open up your Zotero panel, by clicking on the Zotero button in Firefox. This is located at the bottom right hand corner of the Firefox window. Here you will be able to see all your saved biblio-graphic information.

2. To add bibliographic information manually, select from the drop down list the type of resource you are adding, e.g. book. This will add a new record to your library, which you can then edit using the box on the right hand side of the Zotero panel.

3. You can also capture bibliographic data automatically from websites such as the university’s library catalogue. To do this, go to http://voyager.arts.ac.uk/, click on “Basic Search” and then type in the search box the key words you want to search for.

You can also search online catalogues such as the UAL e-library, the British Library, Amazon, Google Books or other university libraries.

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4. Whenever you see this icon on the left in the address bar, you can add record infor-mation automatically by clicking on it. As the information on the UAL catalogue is already there for you to take, you should see this icon.

5. A box will the appear with a list of titles that are the web page. Use the check-boxes to select which items to add to your Zotero library, as there could be more than one source of data on the page. Click OK.

If you are already on the individual title page, the data will be automatically be captured without this list appearing after you clicked the below icon. The icon for individual titles is the blue book.

4. Once you have generated a search list, you can then either capture the data from the titles on this page, or you can go focus on a specific document by clicking on the link. This will take you to the individual page only related to that title.

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6. All of the information will be saved into your library. A dialogue box will indicate that your desired resource is saved in your Zotero task pane.

7. The resource that you have just saved will then show up in your library list in Zotero. In this example, Passionate Detachments was saved into the library. You can refer back to this at a later date without having to find the data again on the internet.

8. To organise your work, you can create folders, called “collections“ to sort your references into. To create a new collection, click on the icon indicated above. Your new collection will then appear in the navigation menu on the left, under “My Library”. You can drag references from one collection to another.

9. From your saved resources, you can then create a bibliographical reference easily using Zotero. Right click on the title of the resource in which you want to create a reference from, and then se-lect “Create Bibliography from Selected Item.”

If you wish to create a bibliography with several elements, you will need to add these elements to a collection. When this is done, right click on the collection in question, then select “Create Bibliog-raphy from Collection”.

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10. You then need to select the style of referencing you wish to use. Remember that UAL uses the “Harvard - adapted for Leeds Met” referencing system.

Selecting “Copy to Clip-board” will ensure that, using the paste command, you can post all the information into your desired software appli-cation, e.g. Microsoft Word, or into an email client.Alternatively, “Save as RTF” will save the bibliography to a file you can then open in word processing programs.

11. If you are using Zotero at home, you can install the referencing style by selecting “Prefer-ences” from the drop menu shown above. Select the “Cite” tab on the window that opens, then the “Styles” button. From here, you will be able to download the “Harvard - adapted for Leeds Met” ref-erencing style. Click on the link as shown below, which will take you to the relevant web page on the Zotero web page. It is important that you do this for your work to be valid within the university.

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13. You can also sync your Zotero library with your Zotero account so that you are able to access your library on other com-puters. To do this, you must first go to the Zotero website, http://www.zotero.org and register for an account.

You can either make your library com-pletely private, or you can make it public, so that other members are able to view your Zotero entries via the website. Shar-ing your library is particularly useful for group work where you need to share sources of information.

14. Once you have created your account, you then need to go to the “Preferences” menu, as shown in step 11, and select the “Sync” tab. You then need to enter your account details and select automatic syncing. From now on, your library will be synced via the Zotero website and you will be able to access your data anywhere in the world.

12. After selecting the right style, and choosing “Copy to Clipboard” you can then paste the bibli-ography into whatever programme you wish. Here, we have pasted the information into an email text editor. This ensures that we can create bibliographies quickly and easily, ready for sending or printing.

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What Else Can I Do?

Apart from the great reasons in the “Why use Zotero” section, there are other features and func-tions that you can use to enhance your learning. To get you thinking, they are as follows:

• Automatically capture citations - There’s never been an easier way to capture and collect quotes for your essay or report. Put everything into your collection using the notes function.

• Remotely back up and sync your library - Never lose your Zotero collection. Your Zotero collec-tion is for life, very much like how fashion designers create an archive of their favourite fabrics, colours and sources of inspiration.

• Store PDFs, images, and web pages - Similar to a wiki space, you can collect a variety of media and formats, great for your research projects. However, you must be aware that creating snap-shots of a website or image will take up a lot of storage space. You can turn this off in your prefer-ences.

• Collaborate - Zotero is greate for group projects because you can share information, data and images easily through the online browser. You can also collaborate with other Zotero collections produced by groups and people all over the world. There’s never been a better way to build upon your knowledge and resources.

• Join the Zotero community - Just like a networking site, communicate with other people using Zotero via their online community.

• Access your library from anywhere - Great for when you need to do work on the go for a project.

• Advanced search and data mining tools - All this information at your fingertips has never been better. However remember, certain websites will not always give you all the necessary information. Be sure to check your bibliography entries as you go to avoid any incomplete referencing.

Whilst Zotero is an extremely helpful tool it is important that you have an understanding of the UALs Harvard Reference guide - in some cases there may be subtle differences in the way that Zotero presents the citation information and it is recommended that check your final bibliography to ensure that it is accurate. Minor modifications to a bibliography generated in Zotero can be made manually.

For more information about Zotero, you can visit the Zotero website at www.zotero.org.uk, where there are more tutorials on how to use the extension and what it can do for you.