Some on this list may be interested in checking out the open source Zotero, http://www.zotero.org/ when it makes its public beta debut later this month. I read about it here: http://www.dancohen.org/blog/posts/introducing_zotero He says it allows you to do "citation management, note taking, and advanced scholarly research right within the Firefox browser." Don't know if his claim that it's better than Endnote is true, but given the recent discussion of IdeaMason, etc., I thought I'd pass it on.

Mark,

I assume this is the program mentioned in the Open Office bibliographic mailing list, wher it said something along the lines that this was the outcome of one of the stages in developing the Open Office bibliographic project, which was going to be released first as a FireFox extension.

So it will be really interesting to see how it develops once it makes it into Open Office.

Graham

Mark wrote:

Some on this list may be interested in checking out the open source Zotero,
http://www.zotero.org/ when it makes its public beta debut later this month. I read
about it here: http://www.dancohen.org/blog/posts/introducing_zotero He says
it allows you to do "citation management, note taking, and advanced scholarly
research right within the Firefox browser." Don't know if his claim that it's better
than Endnote is true, but given the recent discussion of IdeaMason, etc., I thought
I'd pass it on.

Mark and Graham, I look forward to trying Zotero.

Already the best web clip product on the market as far as I am concerned is Scrapbook for Firefox.

If Zotero does likewise it could give some other fairly pricey products a shake up.

I hope Zotero works well. I have found issues with every biblio product I have tried. Sooner or later someone will get it right.

Daly

Daly de Gagne wrote:

I have found issues with every biblio product I have tried. .

So have I :-(


Graham

Graham Smith wrote:

I assume this is the program mentioned in the Open Office bibliographic
mailing list, wher it said something along the lines that this was the outcome of one of
the stages in developing the Open Office bibliographic project, which was going to be
released first as a FireFox extension.

Just to clarify (I am one of the OOo bib project co-leads):

The relationship between Zotero and OOoBib is not so direct. I developed some tools and specifications (for citation styling configuration -- called CSL -- and data exchange*) that I intend to also include in OOo.

The Zotero guys have been helping me with some of this, and are using the same XML languages then. But we were not directly involved in the development. They are fully separate projects that are simply cooperating.

Bruce

* More here: http://xbiblio.sf.net

Bruce,

Thanks for the clarification.

Graham

Bruce wrote:

Graham Smith wrote:

>I assume this is the program mentioned in the Open Office
bibliographic
>mailing list, wher it said something along the lines that this was
the outcome of one of
>the stages in developing the Open Office bibliographic
project, which was going to be
>released first as a FireFox extension.

Just to
clarify (I am one of the OOo bib project co-leads):

The relationship between Zotero
and OOoBib is not so direct. I developed some tools and specifications (for citation
styling configuration -- called CSL -- and data exchange*) that I intend to also
include in OOo.

The Zotero guys have been helping me with some of this, and are using
the same XML languages then. But we were not directly involved in the development.
They are fully separate projects that are simply cooperating.

Bruce

* More here:
http://xbiblio.sf.net

I am a total CRIMPer and would have tried Zotero before but I didn't feel like trying Firefox 2.0.

Today I downloaded it, and I give it a very enthusiastic thumbs-up.

I use ADM for just about everything. I've tried all the others and ADM just works for me. But I have needed a better solution for grabbing web pages. I've tried a few, including Ultrarecall for the past month. Ultrarecall has 2 problems: 1) it costs money; 2) it requires me to carefully drag the right things onto a status bar icon that's often not there, and then - usually - go and check in the slow-loading program to make sure that it captured what I wanted.

Zotero is perfect for my uses, and will single-handedly convert me to a full-time Firefox user. In addition to grabbing web pages, it grabs links to pages and full screen captures, AND it keeps it all, quickly, in an outline form at the bottom of the browser. Plus, I can create my own notes to add to the outline, and I can add notes and field-style information to all of the captured pages. You can also add tags and links between items.

I do a lot of academic research, so the addition of author, publisher and other info is useful for me although so far it has not been downloaded at all consistently (they claim this is one of the high points: auto-fill of these fields. But if it doesn't recognize that nytimes.com is a newspaper, and fail to get the author and publisher for NYTimes articles, then what the heck do you recognize?)

Another nit is that only "article" nodes can have children in the outliner. If they would allow "notes" to have children then maybe this thing could double as a full-featured outliner.

Aside from those items, I'm totally sold, and I highly recommend it.

Dan,

Aside from those items, I'm
totally sold, and I highly recommend it.

Another really useful feature is the ability to "scrape" bibliographic info from an Amazon.com page. Putting together a reading list, or order details for the university library, or adding book info to my bibliographic program has suddenly become a whole lot easier.

Onfolio was meant to be able to do this, but I never got it to work.

Graham

Graham and Dan -

As another FireFox user (I'm on v1.5.0.8) I've been delaying upgrading to the (beta?) v2.0 of FireFox - in order to evaluate Zotero. Do you use a lot of FireFox extensions? If so, have you found most of them still work in FF2?

FireFox has a tradition of breaking extensions and, as I use about a dozen of them, I've been reluctant to move up.

Derek

To answer my own question (maybe). There is a link that claims to provide provides "3 ways to make old extensions compatible with FireFox 2.0." It is here:
http://www.perfectblogger.com/2006/09/make-extensions-compatible-with-firefox2/

Derek

Derek,

I will be interested to hear how you get on with this, I have a couple of extensions that don't work with release 2, but not too bothered about losing them.

However, it would still be nice to get them working.

Graham

Hi

I have found that most all of my favorite 60 extensions are working perfectly in V2... In any case, are you aware of FEBE: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2109/ - and CLEO: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2942/ - these enable backup of one, many, or all extensions - and indeed if you want you can backup your entire Firefox Profile. Therefore if you upgrade and run into problems, you can downgrade, and restore your extensions, or entire profile in a couple of mouse clicks! Now that's safe and cool!

Cheers, Ian

Graham -

I'm probably going to upgrade after the current chores are done. I'll let you know if I have any problems.

Derek

Ian -

No, I didn't know about FEBE or CLEO. They look like excellent solutions. Have you tried both of them? If so, which one worked best for you?

Derek

I too put off upgrading to Ff 2.0 for fear of "breaking" extensions. But I finally took the plunge, just so I could try Zotero, and I have to say it was the easiest Ff upgrade ever--maybe it's because I waited and the extensions had all been updated.

Graham

I would advise getting both - they are both simple to use, and work as advertised. Also, in future, you could look at an extension called Nightly Tester Tools: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1391/ - this enables you to install extensions that are not yet officially upgraded. Most extensions work just fine when installed with this tool - but if you use it, it is definitely highly advisable to back up your extensions/profile just in case a rogue extension messes up your profile - then as I said its real easy to restore to the earlier working state via FEBE/CLEO...

Regards, Ian

Ian

I would advise getting both - they are both simple to use, and work as
advertised.

Thanks, I will give them a look. It all sounds very useful.

Graham

Ian and Graham -

The Nightly Tester route seems the best and quickest one for trying to make extensions compatible with Firefox 2.0. I even got my Net Snippets extension to work using NT - luckily, since it looks as though NS may not be being actively developed.

Cleo and Febe worked fine - although I can't for the life of me understand why extension developers spend so much time on their projects, but so little on simple "1,2,3" explanations of how they work.

As usual, upgrading Firefox was more trouble than it ought to have been (but it IS free, after all...). FireFox 2 is unfortunately NOT compatible with Tabbrowser Extensions according to the extension's author. This is by far the best, but much maligned, of all the tabbing extensions. Tabmix Plus - the only alternative - works for a basic upgrading of FF's tabbing features (which are painfully poor), but session management is dismal (IMO!). In fact I had downloaded a copy of FF 1.5 to downgrade again before I finally figured out how to lock all the tabs in order to get Tabmix to work as I wanted. I think a longterm complication of CRIMP may be bouts of irritability and lack of patience...

After all that, Zotero looks interesting. I've only tried it out on the Library of Congress and Amazon.com for a few minutes, but it did a good job of d/l book information. The trick will be to see how far its features mesh or overlap with my existing software.

Derek