Notes on Zotero

Owned by Alan Harnum
Last updated: Jul 17, 2018
1 min read

Per the recent community meeting on resources, we've started a public Zotero Group to see how it works for holding, organizing and categoring inclusive design resources. This is a public group that anyone can request an invitation to join.

One possibility we've discussed is to eventually to use Zotero's API to fetch content to different sites. There is a very basic example of the possibilities at https://codepen.io/waharnum/pen/LeovaG, using the public READ API (no token required). More complex usage might filter by tags, categories, etc, either in the initial request to Zotero or at the code level.

There's also an experimental set of Infusion grades for the Zotero READ API.

Things to be aware of when adding resources:

  • Zotero supports both free tagging and categories for organizing resources
  • A resource can be placed multiple categories, so categories can effectively be used for controlled vocabulary, IE if we wanted to have a list of all resources developed for a particular project (one stated desire that came up in the meeting)

Outstanding questions that Zotero doesn't seem, at first glance, to solve:

  • Ease of embedding for non-technical users
  • Situating and contextualizing resources for specific projects, audiences, goals