Zotero Releases Standalone Alpha
Zotero, that great note-taking research tool from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, has just been released in a standalone version for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Until this point, Zotero had been a plugin for the Firefox browser. The standalone version has “connectors” available to link it to Chrome and Safari browsers (IE is coming); and plugins for MSWord and OpenOffice are bundled with it.
If you’ve been hesitating to try out Zotero because of the necessary linkage to Firefox, you should give it a whirl now. There’s an online Quick Start Guide to get you going. As well, there are forums where you can find the tips and the answers you might need to become proficient.
The Zotero style repository contains various “default styles,” none of which is law-based. And though there are a few attempts to create legal citation style plugins in the “additional styles” list, none seems adequate yet. Surely it can’t be too hard a job for someone to produce a basic Canadian legal style for Zotero; citation styles for cases, statutes, journal articles and books would get us quite a distance along.
The zotero-legal group is working on this: http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-legal . Background is available here: http://bit.ly/ez4u1M
Hey – just a quick note on legal citation and Zotero. For the past few months, I’ve been developing a citation style which is based on the Red Book, version 7. It’s available from the list of installable styles here.
It’s listed under Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, 7th ed. (McGill Guide).
A word of warning: like American and Australian efforts so far, it is very weak on legislation and cases, but if you’re looking for a quick way to format lots of secondary sources, a few people have been happy with its functionality on that front so far.