I Never Met A Digital Object I Couldn't Cite: Zotero and Alternatives for Personal Digital Libraries

Zotero, a free utility developed at George Mason University, is a client-based application for bibliographic management and document storage while using the web. Based exclusively on open source and on the Firefox browser, Zotero is finding a niche in an open-source world, and recently was cited as the bibliographic management tool of choice for the American Social History Online project. See http://www.dlfaquifer.org/

In this poster, Zotero will be demonstrated and compared to other packages that may be available to users in University settings, and the advantages and shortcomings will be offered. As digital libraries expand, the desire of users to collect objects and even build personal libraries, while maintaining the importance of citing sources correctly, will remain important for anyone who plans to incorporate them into scholarly or popular works.

Jack Widner, Assistant Professor, Reference Librarian, Edinboro University of PA