Using Zotero to promote Evidenceinformed Teaching Dakin Burdick

Using Zotero to promote Evidence-informed Teaching Dakin Burdick (Institute for College Teaching) Lisa Czirr (Library) Oct. 19, 2020

What is Zotero? • It is a free, open source citation management software. • Developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Zotero was released in 2006. It’s most recent stable release was Oct. 9, 2020. • It can store citations from web sources or from Library databases like One. Search. • It can generate bibliographies in many citation formats. • It supports more than 30 languages.

Why Zotero? • Faculty in SUNY Cortland's Online Teaching Fellowship asked for rigorous, peer-reviewed readings. • We built a bibliography for them that permalinked back to the Library's holdings through One. Search. • When the bibliography grew too large, Lisa suggested switching to Zotero. Dakin started an account in March 2020. • Dakin used Any. Style. io to convert the web bibliography into Bib. Te. X and imported that into Zotero. • In April, we published to a public group called the Bibliography of College Teaching and Lisa began working on the tagging of the public group. • In May, we learned of Robin Sullivan's (University of Buffalo) Teaching and Learning Resources site in Zotero, which she has curated since 2010. • In June, we met with Robin to talk about how the two sites were organized. • Over the summer, we refined our ideas and expanded the Bibliography.

What does it look like?

Saving a Citation in One. Search

Copy the Permalink

Paste that into Zotero

How much does it cost? Storage 300 MB 2 GB 6 GB Unlimited Cost Free $20 per year $60 per year $120 per year

Utility for Librarians • Research: create a shared, searchable bibliography covering a specialized topic • Instruction: citation management • Liaison opportunities: research in specific disciplines

Process • Add citations • • Existing materials: personal collections New materials: consider relevance • Clean up tags • Add links where needed • Early Process • • Categories (Discontinued) (Strict) Library of Congress Subjects (Loosened)

Tagging Process: No Existing Tags • No tags • Look for tags in the original record • Consider LC tags • Add based on pre-existing tags in Zotero collection

Tagging Process: Pre-Existing Tags Consider the audience and purpose: what tags will be useful? Edit or Delete: • Mashed together word strings: separate out, edit • Foreign language: delete • Vague language • Broad: "Education", etc • Narrow language • Too specific: "University of Bucharest", etc • Redundancy • Merge: Lecture, lecturing, lectures

Tagging Process: Final Steps • After the MAJOR clean-up, the tags could be better managed for quality, merged, or renamed • Started with low-order “fixing”, moved to higher-order consideration of what makes a tag valuable

Organization: Best Practices • Use tags rather than subcollections • Remove duplicates (in the desktop app) • Rather than merging duplicates, look at what is in each and optimize. • Sort by date for newer entries • Especially with large amounts of entries

Challenges • Lack of analytics • Volume of material • Desktop vs. Browser functionality • Adding contributors: how direct should their role be? • Pulling material from the public database back to the private (and maybe there and back again? ) • Web materials could be moved or removed in the future

Where We are Today • The Bibliography of College Teaching has five members and 2161 items, most of which are from professional journals and are permalinked back to SUNY Cortland library holdings. It is a public site with open membership. • If you are interested in comparing Zotero to its competitors, a comparison of reference management software is available.

References • • • Cli. Arellano, V. (2010). A Case for Zotero. Public Services Quarterly, 6(4), 364– 366. EDUCAUSE. (2008, September). 7 Things You Should Know About Zotero. Ferguson, C. (2013). Technology Left Behind—Let’s Go Zotero. Against the Grain, 20(1). Harding, K. (2014). Zotero. The Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, 34(1), 41 -. Ivey, C. , & Crum, J. (2018). Choosing the right citation management tool: End. Note, Mendeley, Ref. Works, or Zotero. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 106(3), 399– 403. Morrison, G. (2020). Explorations in Bibliography: Zotero Goes Public. Summary of Proceedings. Annual Conference - American Theological Library Association, 218– 221. Morton, A. (2011). Digital Tools: Zotero and Omeka. The Journal of American History, 98(3), 952– 953. Morton, A. (2013 a). Creating New Items in Zotero. The Programming Historian, 2. Morton, A. (2013 b). Intro to the Zotero API. The Programming Historian, 2. Roberts, S. (2013). Counting Frequencies from Zotero Items. The Programming Historian, 2. Sergiadis, A. D. R. (2019). Evaluating Zotero, SHERPA/Ro. MEO, and Unpaywall in an institutional repository workflow. Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, 31(3), 152– 176. Vanhecke, T. E. (2008). Zotero. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 96(3), 275– 276.

Important Links as Tinyurls • Bibliography of College Teaching: https: //tinyurl. com/yygn 373 j • Teaching and Learning Resources: https: //tinyurl. com/y 5 clw 5 ja • A comparison of reference management software: https: //tinyurl. com/ap 4 k 475 • Any. Style. io: https: //anystyle. io/ • Zotero in Git. Hub: https: //github. com/zotero