OpenOffice.org Down Under!

Many people seem to ask if the commercial product Endnote works with OpenOffice.org to manage their bibliographies and citations. However, in the past I have usually referred them to other open source tools available for use in parallel with OpenOffice.org as we wait for bibliographic project to provide a suitable alternative. Now don't get me wrong, the bibliographic features of OpenOffice.org are quite good, but lack some of the more refined touches that some people expect in their work.

I was browsing through some of the common websites I visit for my daily dose of new information and came across a plugin for Firefox to manage bibliographies and citations in a really nice way. I looked at it a little closer and looked at some of the screenshots and thought "wow! that is done really nicely!". The plugin is known as Zotero, which is derived from an Albanian word that means "to acquire". I went to the Zotero website (www.zotero.org) to look up more information an noticed that they offered plugins to other applications. I wondered, no hoped, that they might have the foresight to create an extension for OpenOffice.org and to my surprise they offered one!

Zotero offers you a method to gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and then allows you to share the results of your research in a variety of ways. This is the bibliographic version of Web 2.0. It is designed to work across applications (although there are some limitations here, but still a good effort) and future versions will allow collaborative use of different libraries of references via a number of interfaces.

Zotero offers a simple plugin that allows all the nice features of the older reference management software like Endnote (manages author, titles, publication details etc), and also offers the newer features of tools such as del.icio.us with tagging, and web features such as interaction and advanced searches. This means that when you are working online, you can simply save the reference into a complete record in Zotero and then when you open OpenOffice.org to write your paper, simply reference it again via the extension within OpenOffice.org.

Zotero is progressing in the features it offers and integration with other applications. I must point out that at this point it does not appear to work with Internet Explorer, so if you are still using IE, now would be a good time to make the switch to FireFox. Assuming that you do make the switch, what happens to all the old references you currently have saved away? Well, Zotero allows you import a range of different bibliographic formats including its own Zotero RDF, Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), BibTeX, Refer/BibIX, RIS and Unqualified Dublin Core RDF. They even have a section in their documentation on converting from Endnote to Zotero, so I would recommend that you have a look at Zotero if you need to do any good bibliographic reference management.

Stay tuned for more information as I try out some of the features of Zotero further over the coming weeks.