Zotero is an open source bib­li­o­graphic man­age­ment pro­gram devel­oped by the Roy Rosen­zweig Cen­ter for His­tory and New Media at George Mason Uni­ver­sity (devel­op­ers of the pop­u­lar open source plat­form for online exhi­bi­tions, Omeka). While often touted for its near-magical abil­ity to gen­er­ate bib­li­ogra­phies and cita­tions in word doc­u­ments, emails, or other text-based appli­ca­tions, and for the abil­ity to share cita­tion libraries via the Zotero web­site, there are sev­eral applic­a­ble uses of Zotero (both pub­lic and pri­vate) in rare books and man­u­scripts research and schol­ar­ship, whether as a scholar, stu­dent, librar­ian, or cura­tor. This post is the first in a series intended to explore the value of Zotero in the world of spe­cial col­lec­tions. Below are some per­ti­nent links to get started.

Zotero 3.0 (either as a stand­alone ver­sion with Chrome and Safari com­pat­i­bil­ity or as a Fire­fox add-on) is freely avail­able via the down­load page.

The quick­est intro­duc­tion to many of the pow­er­ful fea­tures of Zotero are the screen­cast tuto­ri­als located on the the Zotero Doc­u­men­ta­tion Tab. Below is a three-minute intro­duc­tion to the basics.

For those want­ing an in-depth intro­duc­tion, see Jason Puckett’s Zotero: A Guide for Librar­i­ans, Researchers and Edu­ca­tors (Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion, 2011).

For Prince­ton read­ers, instruc­tions on synch­ing Zotero with Web Space accounts and down­load­ing the SearchIt@Princeton trans­la­tor can be found on the Using Zotero at Prince­ton LibGuide (see the Addi­tional Set­tings tab).