[LTER-im] zotero for lter sites

[Whiteaker, Timothy L]

Dear IMs,

tl;dr Ignore if you aren't interested in Zotero.
Let's establish Zotero best practices for LTER sites. Who's in?

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I'm getting started with Zotero as a reference manager for BLE LTER.  I'd like to identify best practices for using Zotero to catalog an LTER's publications.

1.       Does a "Zotero for LTER Sites" best practices document exist?  If not, then I want to start one, so...

2.       Would it be reasonable to create such a document?  Or would each site's implementation likely be too different to warrant an attempt at standardization?

3.       What's the best medium for the document?  Google Docs?

4.       Should we set up a working group or do this informally?

5.       Who's interested?  Stace, Marty Downs, John Porter, J. Walsh?

Some things I'd like answered in a best practice doc:

1.       How best to fill out metadata to support research.gov reporting? For example, for non-peer-reviewed conference presentations, the Item Type must be Conference Paper and you should use Proceedings Title instead of Conference Name since Conference Name doesn't import into research.gov.  There are also character limits in research.gov, apparently.

2.       What collections do sites find most useful, if any?  NES<https://www.zotero.org/groups/2124507/nes-lter/items/collectionKey/KMQGQ2SW> has "NES-LTER Conference Presentations" and "NES-LTER Journal Articles" collections under a broader "NES-LTER Product" collection, while BLE<https://www.zotero.org/groups/2211939/ble-lter/items/> currently has everything under the default Library.

3.       How should we name our collections or organize our work to facilitate sharing our items with the LTER NCO group<https://www.zotero.org/groups/2055673/lter_network>?  For example, should our three letter acronym be included in the collection name?

4.       Should we make an IM Zotero account or use personal accounts to manage the group?  NES (user lter-nes-info) and BLE (user ble-im) independently decided to make generic accounts for their site IMs.

5.       Should we prefix our group name with "LTER". Group searches<https://www.zotero.org/search/type/group> start from the beginning of the group name, so you won't find the BLE-LTER group if you search for "LTER", but you will find the LTER Network group.  If I named my group LTER-BLE then you could find my group by searching for LTER (but not if you searched for BLE!).

6.       How should we describe our items to support applications that our website end users will see such as ZotPress<https://wordpress.org/plugins/zotpress/> for WordPress sites and this JavaScript solution<https://github.com/twhiteaker/Zotero-JavaScript-Search-Client> for other sites?

OK, the answer to #5 is probably "whatever you want".  But dammit I don't want to have to think about any of this. I just want a best practices doc to show the way!

Tim Whiteaker
Research Scientist
The University of Texas at Austin

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