iNODE

Statement from George Mason University on Center for History and New Media’s Zotero Software

Oct. 29, 2008

Media Contact: Daniel Walsch, dwalsch@gmu.edu 703-993-8785

The Thomson Reuters Corporation has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over Zotero, a project based at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). A free and open-source software initiative, Zotero aims to create the world’s best research tool and has already been adopted by hundreds of thousands of users at countless colleges and research universities. CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview to its users and the open source community. As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote.

As academics themselves, the creators of the Zotero project strive to serve the scholarly community and to respond to its needs in an age of digital research. In line with that simple goal, they maintain that anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction. CHNM concurs with the journal Nature, which recently editorialized about this matter: “The virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating.”

CHNM remains committed to the openness it has promoted since its founding at Mason in 1994 and to the freedoms of users of its websites and software. Its ambitious development cycle and plans for Zotero’s future remain unchanged. CHNM will continue to develop and implement new research technologies in the pursuit of better ways to create and share scholarship. CHNM greatly appreciates the many supportive comments it has received from scholars, librarians, and administrators around the globe.

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If you want to read about new features in Zotero, head over to Sean Takats blog:

http://quintessenceofham.org/

Summary of the pending litigation on the Citizen Media Law Project’s site. Does a nice job of linking in comment and analysis from across the web. I also added a link to this information on our citation migration site since some in the Mason community haven’t had time to scour the web for information on the litigation.

http://www.citmedialaw.org/threats/thomson-reuters-scientific-inc-endnote-v-george-mason-university-zotero

Getting rid of all-things-Endnote has put me in a rather unseasonable mood for digital spring cleaning.  I’m not sure if it’s that I’ve been using and very much enjoying Open Office 2.4 on the eee PC or just that the latest update of Office 2008 on the Mac still fails to resolve long-standing issues, but I’ve felt that “get out of Office” mood building as well.

When I learned that the newly released (October 12, 2008) OpenOffice 3.0 (OOo3) is now native on the Mac (no longer requiring the X11 layer) and that it can read the newer “.docx” and other XML-based formats unleashed on the world by Office 2007, well, I was sold.

I’ve used it for a couple of days now and can say it’s stable, fast and feature-rich.   The plugin architecture opens up many new possibilities as well.  For example, I installed Sun’s PDF import plugin and found it works great for making small edits on PDF files (I had been using PDFpen for this sort of thing).    From the plugin’s description:

The PDF Import Extension allows modifying existing PDF files for which the original source files do not exist anymore. PDF documents are imported in Draw and Impress to preserve the layout and to allow basic editing. It is the perfect solution for changing dates, numbers or small portions of text.

Speaking of EndNote, I should point out that OpenOffice Writer has a very nice bibliographic database function baked right in. Unfortunately, as I write this, the Zotero plugin for Open Office (enabling you to cite items from your Zotero library in Open Office documents) is not working due to problems with Python support in OOo3 under Mac OSX. But this will surely be fixed at some point so the time you spend now developing your dependency on Open Office will not be wasted.

With litigation pending between Thomson and Mason, we’re letting our campus site license for EndNote expire at the end of November.  When it lapses, any copy of EndNote that was downloaded and installed under the terms of that license will have to be uninstalled and removed.

The library is taking the lead in helping campus users migrate out of EndNote and into either Zotero (why wouldn’t you?) or some other reference management tool. While we’ve had intermittent contact with campus EndNote users over the four or five years that we’ve been primary support for the program, it seems reasonable to expect that we’ll hear from each and every one of them at some point in the next few weeks.

Planning our response we put together two ad-hoc groups: one charged with a “communications plan” and the other a “technical plan.” During the meeting we had on Wednesday, it was suggested we quickly put together a website and reference the address in the one-pager we’re distributing to campus groups. I volunteered to set up a site and assign it a DNS entry. Less than an hour after the meeting ended I had the site up and running, replete with a link to iChat (AIM) and an “ask a question” email form.

How’d that happen so fast?

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Replaced my old phone (an original Razr) with a Razr2 V9 the other day and modified my plan to include the “unlimited” AT&T MediaNet data package.   Within an hour or two of unboxing it, I realized this phone won’t sync with my Mac’s address book via iSync and I’m annoyed that even a little bit of pre-selection research would have alerted me to the problem.   Bummer… and a step backward since the old Razr synced flawlessly.

Now that Apple’s in the phone business, I guess you just have to go with an iPhone if you want syncing support out of Cupertino.

Happily, a few hours later I discovered that this V9 does know one trick an iPhone can’t manage: sharing the phone’s 3G network connection with my MacBook via EDR Bluetooth.

Here’s how it’s done (instructions based on Mac OS X 10.5.5):

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Ran the executive summary of the 2014 Strategic Plan from the Office of the Provost through Wordle to see if I could gain a special insight. Should I be concerned that the word library doesn’t appear? I’m not, but it is curious.