[Web4lib] cool firefox extension for librarians - zotero

[Keith D. Engwall]

Dear Web4lib,
 
I just found a very neat firefox extension and thought I'd share.  It's
called zotero, and it's a kind of research tool.  It allows you to save
book information from web pages (amazon book pages, library records,
etc.) in a little database/list.  You can then pull up that list from an
icon in the status bar and add notes, links to files, tags (it will
parse library records and add subject entries as tags), etc., and even
let you pull up the book through your favorite OpenURL resolver (your
library, worldcat, etc.).  It looks like there may be more that you can
do, but I've only explored it a little bit thus far.
 
It's a little buggy at times (sometimes I have to close out of Firefox
and reopen it in order to get into the database), but it's still pretty
nice.  If your library does not have an openurl resolver, you might try
the following URL in the zotero preferences to get the worldcat
resolver:
 
http://worldcatlibraries.org/registry/gateway
 
(note: I have not tried this from home yet, so I don't know whether or
not it is public... I know that it won't work for journals unless your
IP address is registered at OCLC, but for books it may hook into the
public worldcat interface).
 
Keith