Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/tcVtg0TZOxs

 

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>>  TRISH: 

>>  

Welcome to the Zotero basics webinar, I am Trish Pierson.  Lynn VanLeer is also a reference and instruction librarian and will be answering questions behind the scenes and also if there would be questions for everyone to know the answers to she will go ahead and I will stop at various points or she may interrupt me to get those questions answered.

 

>>   LYNN:  I just added the captioning link in the chat, so the captioning link is there.

 

What we will do for the webinar, it is a ton of information, it may feel overwhelming but we will be sending out the recording, and there is a link to a guide we put together for Zotero that is linked in that part points.  Maybe Lynn can pop that into the chat as well so you have a -- to have resources to go back and look at.  I know it can seem like  a ton of information really fast, but we have not figured out a better way to do this yet.

 

We will be looking at different settings for Zotero that will be useful and make Zotero more functionality.  We are looking at how you get things into Zotero from databases and also from Google Scholar.  Once you get them in there, how you will edit those resources if you need to and how you can organize them to make it more functional for you.  You don't want just a ton of things piled into Zotero and not be able to find them.  So there are different ways to organize, things that may work better for you.

 

The part that everyone loves, how you can use Zotero with Word or another word processing program, to create in-text citations and reference lists.

 

A little bit just about Zotero in general, it is a totally free, open-source software.  Which is great.  What that does mean is, unlike these paid products, you do not get that tech support where you could call up people and have them walk you through stuff.  You have to be a little bit on your own again, if you're having issues with things, I will be pointing at where you can find forums and documentation that will help you figure out your issue and be able to solve it.  But you do not have that handholding type of thing when you have free software like this.

 

It is the pros and cons.  Free, yes, but not handholding tech support.  If that is an issue for you, that is something to consider.  We do have a link for the Zotero download page.  You can download that, it does work with many different operating systems.  It works with Windows, Mac, Linux.  You want to make sure you install a browser connector, because that is a helpful thing so when you are using Firefox or Chrome or Safari or whatever browser you are using, you are able from that browser save things easily into Zotero.

 

If you are using a mobile device, that browser connectors do not really work so upward but they have what they call "bookmarklets" and those are for the different mobile devices out there.  And you need to go to the Zotero site to see, do they have a bookmarklet for the device I'm using?  Great.  And they will have information there on how you can install these things and use them.

 

The thing I will highly, highly, highly recommend and I will repeat this at various points throughout the webinar, you really, really want to create a free account at Zotero.  That is just www.zotero.org. The reason for the free account, not only does it let you post issues to the forums if you have an issue I need an answer -- but you can set up Zotero so it will sync your information from the desktop version  you are using on your computer onto their web based version, so if you ever had any computer issues, You will not lose everything you have saved on your computer.  You have that backup of the web there.  That saves your stuff for you.  And then you are able later when you get a new computer, to go back and re-download Zotero and you can sync it up again, and all your stuff will magically appear on the desktop version.

 

If you are away from the computer, you can use that web version as well.  It's a little more stripped down, but you can definitely be out there serving stuff.   And then sink it back to the desktop so you have stuff in both places at the same time.

 

We are look at how Zotero is laid out, some of the different items you will see, a lot of citation software is very similar, if you understand how one works, then you will understand how many of the others work as well.  But always there will be differences there because they are different software, but you'll see a lot of things that are also quite similar.  We will be looking at where things are on the toolbar, looking at some of those different settings that will be useful to you, like where you set up that sync, that information, once you set up your free account with Zotero, how you set things up so you can actually use that Word or another word processor to do the in-text citations.  So we will look at that.

 

And then how to get things into your library and how to edit them and organize them.

 

This is my library on my computer.  Many of the  citations offers will be similar to this.  They are often divided into three sections.  Sometimes they are called columns, sometimes they are called panes.

 

You will see different folders on the left  and such. in the middle are the items.  And on the right-hand side are the detailed information about that item.  It will tell you whether it is a journal article or book chapter, it will give you the title, authors, sometimes abstracts if those are available when you were pulling stuff and -- it will give you all the different citation information, where it was published , when the volume issue, etc., the DOI numbers if they are available.  If they are not you will see a blank space there.  That is how this works.

 

There is a little toolbar that runs across the top of that so you will see a bunch of different icons.  You put your mouse cursor over, typically you will see it open up a little item that will tell you what that icon is for.

 

Here on the left above the left column, there is a little folder -looking icon, and you can see when I put my mouse cursor over it you see it's a, my collection.  That is where you add folders to your library.

 

 Above the middle section, there are icons here that you can see you can manually add  something to Zotero.  Maybe you have added something in the databases something that did not have a PDF available and you found that PDF somewhere else, you could use that icon to attach it to the record that is in here.

 

I'm going to talk a little bit about these different settings that can be really useful.  To get to most of those, you want to go up to the menu on top that has file, edit, tools and help.  Click on, edit.  And you will see that there is, in the little box that opens, preferences.  We will click on, preferences.

 

This is where you can set up a lot of different preferences for Zotero.  Under the tabs on the top of the box that opens, you will see general, and this is just stuff like you can set it to have the font size not be small, so you do not have the teeny tiny print you can make it extra-large if you want.  Or medium or whatever.  There are a lot of different information about things like automatically retrieving metadata for PDFs.  Etc.  A lot of that is better if you just leave it set as the default stuff.  Because these will be things that will be fairly helpful.

 

You may want to go back at some point and decide if it works for you or if it is something you want to change.

 

We talked about creating the absolutely free account with Zotero.  If you look under the sync tab, this is where you can actually set up that information back and you will see because I already have mine linked, it tells me username and it has my name.  There is a little button where I can unlink it if I wanted to, but if you are setting this up you will see an option here where it is available to link your account.

 

The Zotero account will be whatever you want to use therefore like your username and password.  But you will need to put that information in here.  The default options are to sync automatically, which I highly recommend because that way you do not have to try to remember, oh, yeah, I need to sink this information. Zotero will constantly do that for you in the background.

 

Anything you are adding into this  dustup will automatically get synced through that version once you set up that fee account.

 

Under the cite tab, this is something you want to set up.  You are able to choose the style, which will always be APA sixth edition.  I have already added that in there, so we will do that.  That is where you would choose that, and that is where Zotero will know, once you set up with a word processor, that the APA sixth edition is what you want.

 

There is another tab in this area for cite Word processors, so if you click on that, you can see you have the option of Microsoft Word or LibreOffice, which is an open source word processing software.

 

Under the advanced tab, the other thing you will want to do is look about the middle of the box that opens, under Advanced, for open URL.  There is a box for resolver and you can see there is a URL in there now.  This is Walden's open URL resolver.  This tells Zotero you are a student at Walden and you have access to the stuff in the Walden library, and this is the URL that you use to do that.  To tell Zotero that.

 

This gives you an option -- which I will show you in a bit -- if you have something in here, you can tell it to look in the library to see if there is fulltext.  So maybe you are out and finding information from other places, not the library, and your pulling it into your Zotero library and you want to see, does the Walden library have that?  You could take that information and search in the library -- or, you can just click the button and tell Zotero to do that work for you.  That will only work if you have this open URL resolver in there.  And we do have a link in the PowerPoint to the place where that lives, and also I will show you that in a bit  so don't worry about trying to hastily scribble all of this down.  It is much easier to go to the guide where we have it, and copy and paste it in.

 

Those are some of the more useful settings you will want to be aware of and know that those are things you will want to set up.  Again, that will be under edit, and preferences, that box you can set all that stuff up.

 

I will stop here and see if we have any questions before we jump into how to add stuff.

 

>>   LYNN:  There are no questions, let's forge ahead.

 

>>  TRISH:  I will jump into the library databases and click on one of these folders because I want one of these things to be saved in that particular folder.  I'm going to do a super quick search.  We are just doing whatever here -- it does not really matter what you are doing or which database you are going to search in the library, this will work for any of those.

 

You have downloaded Zotero and the browser connector, I'm currently using Firefox but there are connectors for chrome or Safari, whatever of those browsers you are using.  If you are using Internet Explorer or the Microsoft things, it really does not love Zotero at all, so you will have to use a different browser, unfortunately.

 

Once you have  the search going, you have the connector installed, you will see an icon at the top of your browser page.  If you look to the right, there is a tiny icon.  This is not something you would necessarily look at and say, oh that must be Zotero -- what Zotero does, the icon will change depending on what sort of items you can say.  You may see a folder like this, which means you can look for items because we are looking at the search page.  I will click on the folder icon.

 

If you hover the mouse cursor over it, it will typically tell you something about Zotero there also.

 

This will open another box, and you will see the first page of results and we can randomly go ahead and click on a few of these.  Just click in the little box in front of each item you want, so you can see a check mark there.  Once you do that, go to the bottom of the box and click, okay.  That is telling Zotero I want to save all of these items into my library.

 

You will see a dialog box that pops open and it will say it is saving to that particular folder we have chosen.  If you want to save it someplace else, you can use the arrow and change the folder there.  You will see it walking through, these are the things I am saving.  For some of them you will see there are PDFs available that Zotero is able to save, so it is grabbing those for you.  For others there's not so you will not get the full text there.  So that may be something you want to go back and double check and see if you can find somewhere else.

 

It will sit there saying it is saving the list.  So you can ignore that.

 

That is how you save multiple items.  And then if you wanted to save just, like you're looking at the search -- you know, I've already found some of these -- I really only need the one thing.  What you can do then is just pick that particular item in the search results and click the title.  What that will do in this database is open up the page and give you more information about the article in an abstract.  Here we go back up to the top of the page, to the right of the address bar, and that you will not see that folder, because we are not looking at a whole bunch of different items, only one thing.

 

Now that little Zotero icon has changed and it looks like a piece of paper, and that tells us we're just looking at one item.  Click on that piece of paper, and you will see that it is telling us it is saving that one item to that folder that we chose.  Boom.

 

That is how easy it is once you've got Zotero installed and the connector, just go ahead and save when you are out there searching.

 

Do we have any questions about this?

 

>>   LYNN:  No questions so far, Trish, it's very clear.

 

>>  TRISH:  This is how you say things from the database, people say, what if I am not in the database and I am looking somewhere else?  Zotero does work other places -- so we will go and actually  take a quick look at Google Scholar, so that you can see-- paragraph I am going to just type in -- hit search so we come up with some items.

 

You can see we have done the search in Google Scholar and got results showing.  If we go back to the right of that address bar, we can see our little folder icon is showing up.  If I click on that folder icon, you will see it has the first 10 or so results listed.  We can just click on any of the items that we wanted to save.  And then you click on the, OK, button at the bottom.  Then you will see  the box that opens up and it will tell you that Zotero is saving the stuff we picked from Google Scholar to our test folder in our library.  So, again, Zotero can save webpages.so if you are out there looking at something like the Department of Labor statistics website or whatever, and you want to save a page there's you can get back to it later, you can go ahead and save it.  You will just see a different looking icon for a webpage.  You can say that as a snapshot and then you can find your way back to that later.

 

Google Scholar -- sorry, Zotero can save all kinds of different things, and not just the library databases.

 

Once we have gotten things into Zotero...  And you will see that since we had clicked on, test folder, these are all the things we have added and that are getting added in as we go.

 

You will see the list there of things.  I'm going to click on something that is a journal article.  Once we do that, you will see on the right pane or column the more detailed information about that particular item.  If you want to edit or change any of this information for any reason, you would just click on the field that you wanted to.  Let's say for some reason, the information about the article, maybe the title is slightly different, and you need to change it, you can click and see that you can move your cursor around and change any of that information you wanted to.

 

The one nice thing is for title, because we at Walden are all about APA, you will see this is a title that is more in Title Case, it has the capital letters.  We know for APA, that is not something we want.

 

You can either click into it and manually change all of the capital letters.  Or with Zotero, you can right-click on that and it will give you an item 2, transform text.  And there you can pick what is called sentence case which means it is going to change.  It will keep the C for the first part of the title, challenging the gender hierarchy of and it will change the rest of those things into small case.  If it is a long title that can be handy because then you don't have to go in and manually change all that, you can just right-click on the title, transform text, if you do have something where you have a: and another part of the title, you may have to go in and play around with that manually and fix it.  Or if you end up with proper nouns, it will change to small case, and you may have to go back in and put the capital back in.  But at least it gives you the option to not have to manually change everything.  I recommend that as you put things in the library, at any stuff like that, the title you put into the APA format, just so it is already correct the way you want to use it later in citing things, that we don't have to manually change your citation information in a Word document all the time, it will just be nicely set up for you the way you need it.

 

The other thing I want to show you is we talked a little bit about items that may not have a PDF with it, and you want to manually add that, so let's say you found that PDF for this some place later, you can go here to the paperclip icon, attach a stored copy of the file and add it that way.  If you have a bunch of PDFs that you have already saved that you want to add into Zotero -- what you can do is you can also drag and drop.

 

Let's say you had several PDFs from someplace else that maybe you want to save in your Zotero library.  You can drag those and drop those into the folder you want it to be in.  What Zotero will then do is search for the information about that item.  So if you have the PDFs, instead of putting in the information and then manually attaching the PDF, you can just drag it in there, and Zotero will  say, let me see what information I can find out about this PDF.so you can see we have it attached and we have all of this different information, the title, the author, DOI number, etc.  Zotero was able to search by just dragging the PDF in.  Which is pretty fabulous.  That can be quite handy when you have those PDFs that you want to add in.

 

The other couple things I want to show you here -- above this section on the right, there is a tiny arrow pointing to the right, you can click on that to open more options.  If there is a PDF that is attached to the particular item, you can click on the PDF and open it from there because I talked about with the open URL resolver, that you want to set up in your preferences, you can do the library look up.

 

You would click on that and what Zotero would do because it knows you have access to the Walden library, is it will look to see, can it find that information about the item in the library, and can it find the full text?  So if you're pulling stuff from other places where you do not have the full text there, just clicking on the library look up can be really helpful to see, can I find text for this item?

 

You will also see CrossRef look up.  I like to explain this. What it is doing it is just doing more of that same looking for information about the item.  So, it is not something where it is just taking you to that DOI search on CrossRef. It is information that CrossRef is using behind-the-scenes, back behind the stuff that they are pulling information from, and it is just another way to look to see if you can find that information.

 

Sometimes you actually find the DOI that way, but not always.  It is not like the shortcut way to go to CrossRef and look up your DOI numbers.  I just like to make people aware of that.  So you know what it does and what it does not do. Let me stop and see if we have questions.

 

>>  LYNN:  Is there a limit to how many items can be saved in Zotero?

 

>>  TRISH:  There is.  You are able to purchase additional storage -- which you can see on the Zotero website.  It is a reasonable price for the lot of different citation management softwares will allow you to do that.  As you can see from my library, I have quite a few things in here, and quite a few  PDFs and I have not run into the issue of storage yet. I know that you can store quite a few things.  If you're working on something huge like a dissertation where you have a lot of citations and a lot of PDFs, plus you are doing projects and may be writing articles and doing class work, so you end up with a whole lot of things on there-- you may run into that where  eventually you will hit a point where it will say, yeah, you are out of storage.  But it offers quite lot --

 

>>   LYNN:  It is 300 MB.  Just look that up.  I was like um I don't know either [Laughter].  It just dropped -- I dropped the link into the chat here for everybody to see the storage costs.

 

>>  TRISH:  Excellent.  Yes, it is pretty reasonable.  It is not like they are price gouging people for storage.  If you did need extra, you have that option.

 

Talking about organizing things and how Zotero is working here.  So, on the left side, under, my library, this section here, you will see I have a variety of different folders set up.  You can add as many folders as you want, you can actually add subfolders to folders, sub, subfolders to boulders, keep going.  There are a couple different ways to do that if you wanted to add a folder to my library, you can see above the section there is an icon that looks like a folder with a + and they call it folders collections.  You can then enter a name for the collection.

 

Let's do another test folder.  Once you have the folders name entered, you click, okay, and we have not only our test folder but test two.  If you want to do a subfolder, just right-click and say sub collection -- let's say testing.  You will see a subfolder, and then you can keep going.  You can do a crazy amount of folders and subfolders, etc.

 

Something to know about Zotero is "my library" is everything you put into Zotero ever.  The folders are only a way to organize things.  It is not like if you put something from your library into one of these folders, it will disappear from my library.  It will always be here.  Everything you have put into Zotero will always be in this, my library, section.  It is just dragging a copy into the other folders to help organize it and make it easier for you to find things on a particular topic.  If you wanted to drag something from your library into any of these folders, just click on it to grab it, and then you would just drag it to the folder you want to put it in.  Let go, and it will show up there.  And you can see it is in there now.

 

So anything from your library, you can put it in several different folders if you wanted to --and it will always, everything always still  be in the, my library, section, but it will also be in these other folders as well.so it just makes it easier to find things.  Something I wanted to point out also, there is a section here for duplicate items.  We do have some -- so let's say I got overzealous in adding things from the library databases, and I added things more than once.  I could go ahead and click on one of the duplicate items and you will see in the column on the right that there is something that says merge two items.  Now we can merge both of those.  A lot of times it will tell you that you added those at different times you can pick which version you want to keep.  I will select the last one.

 

It has gone ahead and merged.  The thing with the middle section, the, my lover, that has all the information that you have ever put into Zotero, you can sort things here alphabetically.  You'll see mine is set up to be alphabetical by title.  A couple of these are at the top.  Has a little quote in the front, starting with a number.  And then it starts with a capital A and goes down.

 

If I click on the title heading at the top, what I will then do is change it so it is sorting from the bottom up. So now if I go to the top, you'll see it will start with the Z's.  If I click again it will start with the A's --you can do the same thing with your authors field, it is called creator.  So let's say we want to Apple alphabetize things by author. You can click that. and it will sort it alphabetically for you.

 

So you can go back and forth however it makes it easier for you to find things.

 

The last part of the organizing and want to show you before we get into looking at citation and  reference list part that is popular with people, is once you clicked on any of these records in the middle section, the detailed information you see on the right, there are little tabs across the top of that also.  This will default to, info, and give you all this explanation about the particular thing but you do have options here as far as organizing things.  You can add a note, so maybe you're working on something like a capstone where you have a certain framework and you want to make notes about that so you can find the information later and also add tags, Zotero often does, especially with the EBSCO company databases, it pulls across subject terms as tags.

 

So often you will see a bunch of tags already there.  It pulls the information from the database.  You can either keep these and use them or say, I do not really care about that and I will never care about that or look at that.  We'll see with the tags added in, there is a minus sign at the right to get rid of those. and then you can add any tabs that would work for you.

 

Related, I do not use this much but it allows you to show there are connections between things.  Zotero recommends this for things like if you have a bunch of book reviews that relate to a book.  And you have all those items in your library, you can show there is that relationship therefore those or book chapters to a book, something like that.  And they do have more information on their website about that and how that works.

 

If you are using something like the tags, you will see on the left underneath the folder information we looked at, there's an alphabetical list -- these are all tags that Zotero has.  A lot of these are not ones I have put in but ones Zotero has pulled across from the databases.  If you wanted to find something tagged here, you can -- select that -- and anything that has that particular topic will show up in the middle.  I have not really done these -- many that are particularly useful are showing up down here.  The automatic tags may be something if you are going to use the tagging, you want to really go in and get rid of a lot of those and pick things that are more useful, as far as how things will work for you.

 

Do we have any questions about any of this before we move on to the in-text citations?

 

>>   LYNN:  I see no citations, Trish, let's go to the fun stuff.

 

>>  TRISH:    I'm going to open a Word document will have randomly copied a paragraph from someplace, that I don't even know where at this point.  This is not about the actual text -- it is just random, sometimes we just randomly add things in here that are whole bunch of letters that don't even make sense.  It does not really matter.

 

Once you have downloaded Zotero, you have Zotero open and you have added that connector for whatever word processing software you are using, I have a Word document open -- you can see Zotero at the top menu.  And you can add in-text citations and bibliography.

 

I will put my cursor where I want a citation to be and I will click on add/edit citation in the Zotero toolbar.  You will see it is popping open a long skinny box you can type in.  You can either, if you know the author or title of the item, you can just start typing that information and you can see that Zotero will open anything with those particular letters big since I typed just two, it's pulling up a lot of stuff but typically you will have more information there. I will just type anything from this list and you will see that it is popped that in.  I hit the enter key and it will input that citation.

 

The next place I want to put in a citation, and typically you will do this as you are typing, so probably will not have like a giant document that you have to -- you will just do things as you go.

 

I put the cursor where I wanted and going back to the add/edit citation option in the toolbar, and the box opens again.  There's another way you can do this and I will show you.  You see at the front of the box, there is a little Z and a little tiny arrow pointing down.  If you click on the arrow you can choose, classic view, as an option.

 

What classic view does, it almost opens up, I like this tiny mini Zotero library.  You will see the folders listed here, the information is listed about the articles.  Let's say we wanted some things from the test folder we did earlier, you can say, this is something I need.  Let's say you have  multiple items from the folder that you are using for the particular citation, at the bottom of the box, there is an option for multiple sources.

 

Click on that.  And you will see it opens another little box on the right.  To get things from the middle section, you want to click on the particular item and you will see between the middle section and the right section, there's an arrow that points to the right.  Click on that.  You pull the thing from the middle of your box to the right.  We can go ahead and copy another thing, click on the arrow.  One more thing, click on the arrow.  Now it is pulled three items from the middle section to the right.  And then you would go down to the bottom of the box and click, okay.  We are done, now you will see it has put all of the different things in there as a citation.  I will do just one more of these.  Back up to the add/edit citation on the toolbar.  And I'm going to go ahead and click on the little down arrow again to pick the classic view and open the library.  And I will pick just one thing this time.  Click on one and then click on the little button that says, okay.  And it is pop that item in there.

 

Typically, you will open in a whole new page for this but  I will key down a couple so that we have a little break there.

 

Once you have all the citation information in there and you want to add your reference list or bibliography, you go back up to the toolbar and click on add/edit bibliography.  You will see now that what it has done is pulled all the information from the citations we put in, and created in alphabetical order the reference list or bibliography.  You will see it is really just using things as they are in Zotero.it will show up where we left it there.  You can manually change it here, but this is why I think as you're putting stuff in your library, if you just remember to edit things like the title right then, and you do not have to worry about having to go back and manually change it later when you're actually creating citations and reference lists, you can just have it be the way that needed to be there.  And then you can have it show up here correctly.

 

Do we have any questions?

 

>>   LYNN:  Not seeing any at the moment.

 

>>  TRISH:  All right.  I will close out of this document.

 

>>   LYNN:  I do have a question about in the library.  She wants to know, what are the blue dots along the right side of the list of articles in the library?

 

>>  TRISH:  You will see a tiny little paperclip icon at the top -- where the heading things are, and all that means is there is some kind of attachment here for this.

 

>>   LYNN:  You think I would remember that as many times I have done this with you but I totally forgot.

 

>>  TRISH:  In front of each of these things you'll see there's a tiny arrow pointing to the right.  If you click on that, it will open that up so you can see  the PDF, and that is what that little blue dot is for.it just means there is something added to that.

 

We click on the next one you will see there is a PDF there.  So that is all that is, it just shows you these things with blue dots have PDFs.

 

I think it helps if you just go into Zotero, and just play around a bit and just look at some of the stuff.  I will be showing you their webpage you can see where you can find information, a lot more information, but how do you Zotero, use the features.  And if you're having tech issues, again --

 

>>   LYNN:  A follow-up question is some have arrows but not dots.

 

>>  TRISH:  Like at the beginning part of these?  Yeah, so you will see, with the arrow that means something is associated with this, but it is not necessarily like a fulltext item.  So they are not doing that as an attachment.  So this has a little EBSCO record, which means that it has information it has pulled across from EBSCO.  But it is not technically, like an attachment.  It is not a PDF.  So, if you see little arrows, that means there is something there and it might even be something like a note, if you've created a note.

 

This is one where you see this icon thing, this is just a note that I created at one point for people during one of these webinars.  In that note I just put evidence-based practice information.  If we click on that, that will show -- it will go back to the note field over here instead of the information and it will just show the notes that says evidence-based practice information.  If you clicked on notes, you would see there it is.  It is just showing you something is here, but if you do not see the dot in that far right section, just means it is not going to be like a PDF or some kind of document.  Do we have any other questions?

 

>>   LYNN:  No, we are good.

 

>>  TRISH:  Okay.  Cool.  I am going to go to the Zotero website so you can see that. 

 

This is the Zotero website and you can see that if you get to the Zotero home, it will give you the ability to download stuff and it will tell you Mac, Windows, Linux, whatever version of things you've got, there is usually an option.  If you get to the download page, it will give you more options for things like the connectors for your browser or if you are using the mobile device the bookmarklets.

 

I have already signed into my account, so if we click on my library, this is what the web-based version of the library looks like.  You will see, since we added test two, here, during the webinar, it has synced over, so that shoulders folding up here and you can see test, etc.  Anything new we have put in Zotero during the webinar, it has synced automatically and it is showing on the web version.  You can see it is a little more basic, does not have all of the options you will see on the desktop version.  But you can definitely still use this to add things.  So it is an option and it does give you a great backup in case you ever have issues.  I had one catastrophic computer crash once and that was enough for ever.  Hopefully that will never happen again.

 

You do not want to lose stuff that you've spent a lot of time working on.  If there's a way to back stuff up, then I say, do it, especially when it is free.  You might as well set up the account.  It is superfast and simple and easy.  Then you've got that sort of peace of mind of knowing that if your computer crashes, and you have your stuff stored someplace else.

 

Okay.  We have talked about the whole issue with tech support and how the library cannot provide all of this expensive tech support for Zotero.  A couple different places you can get information here on the Zotero website -- there is a tab for documentation, and what this is is just a lot of information about how to do things with Zotero.

 

It will tell you FAQs, it will if you information on how to add things, how to get information from PDFs, how if you are using some other citation management software and you want to import yourself into Zotero, it will tell you how to import from other reference managers.  Information on searching and sorting -- we were not able to get into all of this stuff today just because we only have one hour, and you can only cover it so much stuff.  But this will give you a lot more information and a lot of other features that Zotero  has that we could get into.

 

Forums is  also a feature on top, so if we click on forum, it will open the forums section.  If you are having technical issues, this is where I tell people to go first.  Go to the forums and see procure what you can do is look through, it will give you more recent things that are going on.  And if you are having a recent problem, a lot of times other people are having that same problem.  And so you may see -- look -- an error message about updating the document.  That is exactly what is happening to me.  You can click on that and a lot of times you'll see that somebody else is having a problem and someone is going to offer information through the forums about how to fix it.  Sometimes those will be people who are working with Zotero, sometimes they are other people because it is an open source project, there are a lot of people that pop up here see make it information from lots of different places and you may get like multiple different things you can try.  At least, that is a place to start.

 

Looking through this just to see, okay, is the information about my problem?  If you do not see it, there is a little search box at the top of the page, so you can go ahead and type in, say, your trying to figure out something that was going on because you will be having problems with office 365 -- so we will go ahead and search.  And you can see you are getting information here, and there's something from six days ago with someone having problems with office 365. you can see if they are having the same problems of you.  If the answer is, yes, the chances are you are going to get good advice on how to fix that.

 

Again, this is really -- if you're having tech problems, this is where we will point you to.  You might as will go there and start there first.  And as I said, that is kind of that trade-off with totally free software , the price is that sometimes you have to put a little more work in yourself. Instead of having someone walk you through the tech support.

 

Zotero has been around for a long time, and it is pretty robust.  I have not had a lot of tech issues with it.  I have not had a lot of students who have complained that it is glitchy and stuff like that either.  I think it is a pretty decent project for being free.

 

The other thing I wanted to show you -- we talked about the Zotero guide.  If you are on the library homepage, click on the big library skills button.  On the left, you will see, build library skills.  A little box.  And a link for the library skills guide.  Click on that link.  This will open a page that has a lot of different library guides.  If we scroll all the way down to the bottom of the alphabetical list, you will see Zotero at the bottom.  We will click on the guide.  And you will see this is the Zotero guide.  It has a lot of information we have talked about today in the webinar, plus more.

 

If you are wanting that open URL resolver link, there is a little section on the left, fulltext and open URL.  If you click on that, it will tell you a little more about the open URL.  And it will give you that open URL right there, and you can just copy and paste that back into the preferences in Zotero.  So there you will just go to edit, preferences, and look for the open URL section.  It will be under, advanced.

 

We do have a variety of other guides in that listed there, we have just a general citation management software list of guides.

 

And if you want to some more general information about citation software, that is good place to go.  Eventually the webinar we have done today will end up linked on that Zotero guide -- we do try to link our webinars that go with the guides also.  So that is another place you'll have the option to access it later, aside from the email you will be getting from GoTo Webinar tomorrow.

 

All right.  Do we have any other questions?

 

>>   LYNN:  No, we had a few people that want to review some things but they will get the recording in the email.  So they can rewatch sections that were a little confusing.

 

>>  TRISH:  Great.  Just because we are slightly over time need to wrap things up here.

 

Thanks so much to everyone for coming today.  I know this is a ton of information in a short amount of time.  So, again, we do have the guide that has a lot of the information we talked about, it has some short videos in there.  And we will be sending out the recording, and that will come to tomorrow at some point.  So be watching for that email.  Again, if you do not see that, check your junk or spam folder.

 

Great.  I'm going to go ahead and let everybody out if we do not have any other questions.

 

>>   LYNN:  We are good.  Thank you so much, Trish.  Great information.

 

>>  TRISH:  Thank you to everyone for coming.

End Transcript

 

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