Tag Archives: George Mason University

Zotero on steroids

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I’m a big Zotero fan.  Anyone who has access to the Firefox web browser and needs or wants to keep track of bibliographies, websites, and other material used for research should use it instead of the bloated, overly expensive, difficult to use commercial citation managers such as Reference Manager, RefWorks, ProCite, and the like.  Zotero does everything you need and more, and does it better than the competition.  Did I mention it’s free?!

Today in the Chronicle of Higher Education there is an article (it’s freely available, you don’t need a subscription to access it) about a proposal made by the creators of Zotero to put it on steroids.  Put simply, they intend to make Zotero the tool of choice for researchers, scientists, professors, and others to load their research works into a shared database hosted by the Internet Archive.  The article notes the general failure (oh wait, I mean, lack of success) that libraries have had with doing this on an institution-by-institution basis using tools such as DSpace.  There is a scathing review about so-called institutional repositories and their use by libraries by one of the people I’d deem to be a foremost expert on utilizing DSpace, Dorothea Salo. It is well worth reading.

Anyway, I think this whole idea — actually, it’s more than that because the Mellon Foundation just dished out hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it a reality — has many beneficial implications and I hope Dan Cohen and his team at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University have all the success they hope for with it.  (Thanks to Wally Grotophorst for the mention.)

Questions about tagging

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I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but I have been experimenting for a while now with tagging my posts using Technorati tags. I’ve settled on using Flock as my preferred blogging platform, at least in part because of the ease with which I can associate tags and categories with each post. (By the way, I also love the way that I can use Flock to access my Flickr account and associate tags with my photos and/or quickly insert them into blog postings.) I’ve mentioned in the past that I am somewhat dubious about tagging, but I also can see some of its benefits from the user perspective. The jury is still out. In the meantime, I have some tagging questions that are nagging me. Maybe I am simply exhibiting the anal retentive stereotype of someone with a library cataloging background, who knows?!

  1. Does it matter that there is frequent divergence in how others are tagging the same concept or entity? I’m not even talking about using different (more specific or more general) words. Even when we use the same terms, we can input them in different ways. To illustrate, here is one recent example I’ve come across: “library 2.0″ (what I’ve used) vs. “library2.0″ (notice that lack of a space in between “library” and “2.0″). Then there is the use of capitalization or lack thereof. E.g. “Library 2.0″ vs. “library 2.0″. I don’t view this as mattering that much, but it may matter in certain situations.
  2. I love the concept of developing a tag cloud, and am intrigued by the work of some to tie this into the library online catalog. See, e.g., the work being done at the University Libraries at George Mason University using subject headings extracted from a Voyager system. This is just one example; there are many others. What I am not clear on, though, is whether this is really the answer or solution to the inherent disparity in tags used by different people. Does this disparity not really matter? Of course, there has always been disparity in library cataloging, even when using subject thesauri like LCSH.
  3. It seems that different services develop their own sets of tags. E.g. there are Technorati tags, del.icio.us tags, Flickr tags, and even LibraryThing tags. It seems logical to think about über tags, that allow the user to map between disparate systems. Is that (or would that be) beneficial? A sort of Dublin Core for the tagging world? Is anyone developing something like this or even thinking about it, or am I way off?

There are other niggly things that I can’t think of right now, but if I can remember them later, I’ll jot them down and ask about them in a separate post.