Notes on this Resource

This site was designed (in preference to powerpoint presentations or handouts) for use as a guided resource in a workshop setting, so might not be perfectly suited to use as a self-teaching resource for absolute beginners. On the other hand, it could probably be combined with links to some of Zotero’s video tutorials to provide some of the missing context.

The workshop ran from 10-4pm, with lunch and coffee breaks; the hands-on sessions including practical exercises lasted about 4 hours in total.

The participants were British Library staff - a mix of researchers, curators, librarians, etc, from different departments - so they were all used to online catalogues and familiar with scholarly referencing and the like. But most had never used Zotero at all, and a handful had installed it but never really used it.

So the How Tos begin by assuming no knowledge of Zotero, start with the basics, and move on in stages to more advanced exercises and examples. But they do assume a knowledge of how research, citation and bibliographies work!

Zotero for Firefox was pre-installed for the workshop on supplied laptops, along with the word processing plugin, and all the screenshots are for the Firefox version rather than Standalone.

We recommended getting a zotero.org account ahead of the workshop to make the most of group functions and see how syncing worked, but made it possible to do very nearly everything in the resource without needing to have one. (All account information was deleted from the laptops afterwards.)