When I talk about RefWorks and Zotero, the one feature mentioned that RefWorks can do and Zotero can’t is sharing. Right now, the only way to share materials in Zotero is to export and re-import. Even this has some major advantages over RefWorks: you can export the materials themselves, and your notes and annotations, not just the citations. However, the RefWorks method of sharing bibliographies, especially within an institution, is useful.
So I was excited to see the first article about Zotero’s sharing feature (at least, the first I have seen). I was curious about how the sharing would work, and this article answered a lot of my questions. It’s better than I had hoped. Easy uploading of scholarly materials, and, get this, the Internet Archive will run Optical Character Recognition and store the materials. How cool is that?
Laura Cohen picked up on one particular quote on her blog: “an effort at George Mason University seeks to bypass libraries entirely.” I read the quote as an offhand comment. Obviously, scholars are going to still need libraries- the new sharing system will only handle copyright free materials. Scholars will have to “complete an online form with legal assurances” that the work can legally be uploaded. The majority of materials don’t fit into this category… yet. My hope is that the system will be so fantastically awesome that people will want to use material they can upload- say, open access.
Laura said: “I see no evidence that academic libraries have it in them to band together to sponsor a project like Zotero Commons. We don’t have the group vision.” I think we do. I hear librarians talking about Zotero all the time. They’re promoting it to their students, featuring it on their web pages. Many are supporting Zotero. I’m guessing that many will support this new initiative as well. (Side thought: could this supplant, bolster, or even replace institutional repositories? Drag and drop uploading is an improvement over the current system.)
There are a lot of questions, still. The most pressing one for me, right now, is that I have not kept track of which materials in my Zotero database can be shared and which can’t. There has to be a method of tagging sharable items- and a way for scholars to mark their own content as sharable (by the way, Creative Commons is running a donation drive until December 31st). I am optimistic that these ideas will be addressed, and that librarians will be part of the conversation. Now, whether that means that libraries can be part of the conversation remains to be seen. I certainly hope so.
Edit: Dan Cohen has posted on his blog: Zotero and the Internet Archive Join Forces.