Last week at a conference I met Dan Cohen, who is one of the directors of a new project called Zotero. Zotero is an open-source plugin for Firefox for managing references and bibliography. It is still very beta at the moment, but they seem to be a well-funded, university-backed project that is looking towards replacing Endnote as a bibliographic reference manager, which I think is a great goal.
We have had discussions here in the forums about integrating some sort of reference management software into Moodle. I think that Zotero looks promising, and according to Dan, may actually work without the need for integration. However, he did express an interest in working with Moodle to see if there is a way it can be integrated. They are already working with Sakai apparently. He asked me if I could put him in touch with the Moodle powers so I hope that some of the developers here can follow up on this with the Zotero people. You can find out more about Zotero here.
I've been trying out Zotero and I'm quite impressed. A lot of work still has to be done but I agree it's very promising. I for one would be interested in knowing if Zotero can be integrated with Moodle and how.
This is very useful indeed thank you. I am teaching, or obfuscating, "Academic Writing" this term, and I was thinking of giving an introduction to Endnote but the software purchase would be out of my students price range.
Zotero does not seem to recognise bibliographies some sites (e.g. the free EconPapers) and a lot of the ones in the list of sites that it can deal with do not appear to be free, but when it works it is very straightforward and easy to use.
Timothy
Zotero does not seem to recognise bibliographies some sites (e.g. the free EconPapers) and a lot of the ones in the list of sites that it can deal with do not appear to be free, but when it works it is very straightforward and easy to use.
Timothy