Barrier to Entry
With all the talk of the open standards and free software revolution, the following assessment of Zotero may seem anachronistic:
First of all, Zotero only works with Firefox 2. Yes, not even with regular Firefox as most people use it right now, but only version 2. At the moment, only a release candidate is out, no official version 2 yet. Tilburg University (my employer) has a policy to only support MS programs, so only Internet Explorer is supported. Which means I cannot recommend Firefox to people with only limited computer expertise.
The second aspect of Zotero that needs work, is its integration with Word. The one reason people keep using EndNote, even though they don’t like it that much, is because it is easy to create citations and bibliographies in a text. The integration with Word (again, a Microsoft product which is supported on campus) makes it easy to write an article, insert citations in the proper places, and have EndNote create a good bibliography, using the correct style for a certain publication. Want to submit the article to a different journal? EndNote will change the style of the bibliography for you, in a few seconds.
But it’s actually not. Despite the fact that Firefox is free and better than Internet Explorer, and despite the fact that Zotero is also free and better, this sort of argument is not uncommon at all. It shows just how much weight the MS monopoly places on the market and on innovation. Now guess how hard it is to convince anyone to use OpenOffice.
OTOH, there’s something so incredibly small-minded about all this hand-wringing. The point about integration with Word is not exactly wrong, but a) it will happen (it’s on the roadmap), and b) there’s something so defeatist about the tone. Zotero is free software; if you’re worried about integration with Word — or any other application — then stop sitting around and do something about it! Write a letter or schedule a meeting with the campus IT people who set the brain-dead policies that they will only support Microsoft solutions. Talk to the people who make budgeting decisions and ask them to consider finding a way to direct money away from proprietary solutions into open ones. Talk to your campus computer science department and tell them you want their students to actually help create better solutions. Your institution will benefit in all kinds of direct and indirect ways; you’ll get better and cheaper software, and your students might learn valuable skills that will help them in the future.
If all of us simply worried about what it would take to change the world, nothing would ever get done. Zotero, and CSL, and OpenDocument, and OpenOffice, and RDF is going to do just that in this little corner of the scholarly world.
