Zotero 1.5
Zotero has recently moved its 1.5 release into beta status. Key new features:
- XHTML “rich text” notes
- server-based syncing of libraries (no more rsync to keep my home and office machine in sync)
Aside: I’m a little worried about centralized services, particularly after the Magnolia debacle. Would prefer something more distributed a la laconi.ca.
The Zotero team has also updated its website to reflect the beginnings of the social-networking functionality they will be building out in the future. To wit:
The website functionality also allows you to generate a CV from your library collections. I’ll be adding one once they add support for “smart collections.”
I really hope that the tackle data format issues now, like the hierarchical data model and container-author. Syncing is nice and everything, but if I can’t enter my data properly, there’s nothing to sync …
I sympathize. OTOH, while they work on this, you can still use Zotero to store a lot of stuff now: journals articles, news items, etc.
I have all my data in BibDesk and use biblatex. So far, biblatex is the only solution which lets me store my data in an appropriate way. Every new bibliographic software that gets released has been a step back so far when it gets to the data format. Exporting my data to new software always results in a data loss, because no software can handle the things biblatex can.
I really find it frustrating that I (or some other users in humanities) have to explain over and over again why something like ‘bookauthor’ is needed. These problems aren’t new, they have been here forever and they are known. That’s why I pray for the day when some kind of standardized format appears which takes care of these things, that’s why I want CSL to support this, and that’s why I want Zotero as the most widely used app which uses CSL to support this.
Sorry for the rant. I just needed that.