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I’ve been working with Zotero for several years, and I’d like to guide interested participants through the Zotero ecosystem as it currently exists, but more vitally, I’m interested in working to find new ways for people to mash Zotero’s many-faceted world up with other tools, from annotation to textual analysis to archival research to writing tools, to whatever you bring to the table.

As I understand it, the beauty of Zotero is its capacity for extension and growth, and I would love to share what can be done by ambitious and creative people. My own small experience started by extending and maintaining the translator library that maintains compatibility between Zotero and web sites, import formats, and search engines, and proceeded to include the development of a Zotero mobile client for Android. This has all been a thrilling experience, yet the extant documentation isn’t really sufficient to get a good foot in the door of the deeper Zotero world and I believe a session, a couple of hours with interested minds and some mild expertise, would do much to spur new and unexpected new developments.

The concrete content of the session will necessarily depend on the desires of the participants, but I’m hoping to steer the discussion away from the basics of setting up accounts, formatting references, and the like, so that we can devote time to the more arcane and possibly transformative elements of the Zotero project.

Resources

1. Zotero itself, www.zotero.org/
2. Contribution to Zotero, www.zotero.org/getinvolved/. The plugin, translator, and API information is particularly relevant.
3. API implementations, www.zotero.org/support/dev/server_api. There are open-source API implementations in Python, PHP, JavaScript, Obj-C/iOS, and Java/Android.
4. Zotpress, wordpress.org/extend/plugins/zotpress/. A WordPress plugin that neatly demonstrates the potential of using the Zotero API in new places.

I would also be more than happy to offer an introductory workshop on either site translator development (i.e., making sites work with Zotero and Zotero work with sites; www.zotero.org/support/dev/translators) or basic API usage (i.e., making Zotero data show up in program/place X). Please let me know in the comments or on Twitter (@ajlyon) if people have any interest in such introductory workshops