Using Zotero to manage OpenOffice.org bibliographi

YGC

                 
                                                                                                         By
Dmitri Popov
                                                                                                 on
                                                        October 15, 2007 (9:00:00 AM)                                       
                                                
                                                   
If
OpenOffice.org's own bibliography feature doesn't really cut it for
you, you have several choices. One popular bibliography solution is
Bibus
,
a cross-platform tool that integrates nicely with OpenOffice.org. It
is, however, not the only bibliographical tool out there. In fact,
there is another nifty tool called
Zotero
that turns Firefox into a powerful research tool. More importantly, it
comes with an OpenOffice.org extension that allows you to use Zotero as
a bibliography database. Zotero also sports a few clever features that
make the process of creating and managing bibliographies much more
efficient.
                                                
                                               
                                                   

While
you can populate your library with bibliographic entries manually,
Zotero can do the donkey work for you. It comes with a set of
translators that can sense and extract book data from the Web page
you're currently viewing. The
list of supported Web sites
is impressive, and using Zotero to extract book data from them is straightforward. To see how this works in practice,
install Zotero
, point your browser to
Google Books
,
and do a search for "openoffice." If you take a closer look at
Firefox's address bar, you'll notice a folder icon -- that indicates
that Zotero has discovered several book entries on the page. Click on
the icon, and you'll see a list of all the book titles. To add them to
your library, select the desired books and press OK. Zotero not only
adds the selected entries to the library, it also populates fields such
as Title, Author, Publisher, and ISBN. If the current page contains
only one book, Zotero displays a book icon in the Address bar, and you
can add the book to your library by clicking on it. Besides printed
publications, Zotero allows you to add Web pages to your library, which
can come in handy when you need to include online sources into your
bibliography.
Once you've added books to your library, you can manage and annotate
them. At the very least you might want to group related books into
folders. You can, for example, create a folder called OpenOffice.org
and add all the OpenOffice.org-related books to it. Unlike more
conventional bibliographical tools, Zotero allows you to do a few
clever things with library entries. You can add tags to each entry, add
notes and attach files to the entries, and even cross-reference them
using the Related feature. Keep in mind, though, that not all of these
features are available for the Web pages saved in the library; you can
only add tags and cross-references.

Click to enlarge
Another feature you won't find in a conventional bibliography application is Timeline. It's based on the
SIMILE Timeline
project, and you can use it to present your bibliography with an
interactive display of books and articles published in a given year,
month, or any other specified period.
Using OpenOffice.org with Zotero
Zotero's major attraction is its ability to interact with OpenOffice.org Writer via the
Zotero extension
, which is also available for
NeoOffice
.
To install the extension, choose Tools -> Extension Manager in
OpenOffice.org, press Add, and select the Zotero.oxt package. Restart
OpenOffice.org, and you should see the Zotero toolbar containing four
buttons: Insert Citation, Insert Bibliography, Refresh, and Set
document preferences. The latter allows you to configure a few
important settings, such as a desired citation style, the way citations
are displayed in the text, and formatting options. All these options
are self-explanatory, so you shouldn't have problems configuring them.
Using other Zotero extension features is equally easy. To insert a
citation, press the Insert Citation button and select the desired
publication. Before you hit the OK button, though, there are two other
options you might want to specify. If you want to include, for example,
the page number, you can do so by selecting the Page item from the
drop-down list at the bottom of the window and entering the page number
in the field to the right. To specify multiple citation sources, press
the Multiple Sources button and select the publications you want.
Finally, press OK to insert the citation.
Generating a bibliography is even easier: place the cursor where you
want the bibliography to appear and press the Insert Bibliography
button. The inserted bibliography updates itself automatically, so when
you insert a new citation, the source publication is automatically
added to the bibliography. There is, however, a tiny fly in the
ointment. When you remove an existing citation from the text, its
source publication remains in the bibliography, and you have to remove
it manually; pressing the Refresh button doesn't seem to have any
effect.
Zotero is a boon for users looking for an easy-to-use bibliography
tool that plays nicely with OpenOffice.org. Also, Zotero's ability to
automatically extract bibliographical data from Web pages as well as
save and manage other types of data makes it an excellent all-around
research tool. The Zotero extension for OpenOffice.org still has the
few annoying bugs, but once they are squashed, the
Zotero/OpenOffice.org combo will be an appealing proposition.
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                                                        Dmitri Popov is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in Russian, British, US, German, and Danish computer magazines.                                               
               
               

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