Zotero for iPad

so hi again dan also here with history for today and yesterday i got a response from zotero on my request to join the beta group for their ipad app i was very happy i installed it on my ipad and it looks pretty great i can see all my folders and my files i can open attached pdfs and highlight them and this is extremely useful as now i will be able to be more flexible in where and when i can read articles and any old books that i can find and add to zotero as attachments to my bibliographical references in my white pine lumber industry research there are a lot of old books from the 19th and the early 20th century that i can find online and read this way so this will be a big help and this may even be the nudge that i need to begin using zotero as more than just a place to store my citations now i've been using zotero for several years now i didn't actually use it when i was writing my dissertation although i was vaguely aware in the early 2000s that roy rosensfeid's center for history and new media at george mason university had built an open source alternative to the proprietary endnote app that i was using endnote had been recommended to me by my faculty advisors and it worked really well for me at the time unfortunately around the same time that i was finishing my initial research endnote was purchased by thomson reuters that was probably in early 2008. i can't find the exact date of thomson reuters acquisition of the app but i do know that the company actually sued the commonwealth of virginia and george mason university over zotero that september of 2008. if suing zotero hadn't been a bad enough example of what it looks like when a conglomerate buys an app like endnote thompson reuters then embarked on a major release upgrade program that charged big fees every year for people to stay up to date with the latest bloated version of the app i put up with this for a couple of these upgrade cycles because after all i had thousands of notes in my database and i needed them to complete my dissertation and then the book that followed it but once that book was completed i dumped endnote and i began using zotero in the process i lost my original database when my annual subscription to endnote finally lapsed i still have the file but it's in a proprietary format that i can't read at some point maybe i'll find another scholar or maybe one of the librarians at my university still has endnote and i may be able to extract some of that data i haven't needed it yet but it's still really annoying to think that all of the work that i put into collecting and annotating and commenting on all of those sources is basically lost to me just because a software company wants to extract rent and this experience probably affects my feelings about proprietary data storage formats in apps where i have to allow my work to reside in a database that's controlled by a vendor and then pay rent to access it there's actually one vestige of endnote that i have left on my system as a reminder whenever i launch microsoft word on one of my older computers that had had endnote on it i get an error message saying that word can't find the site while you write plugin this is very annoying because i have to click a box saying okay before i can go ahead and open word but i use that annoyance to remind me why i'm trying to find ways to use open source apps where i control my own data but back to zotero i'm very excited that the ipad version is nearly complete i tried it and everything seems to work great except that i can't automatically see the notes and tags and highlights that i make on the ipad in the version on my desktop i need to save the annotated pdf back to zotero using the little export box with the arrow that's at the top right and then swiping right to the three dots the more option and choosing zotero as a destination this isn't all that time consuming once i figured out how to do it and i assume that it will get much more automatic in the future and my reaction to this new version of zotero may be a little bit different from some other people because i'm going to be doing the reading notes transfer manually so i'm not really that concerned about the zot file to md notes workflow or how that will change with this new ipad app i like to use this process of rereading my notes as another step in that evolution of making the ideas of other folks into my own ideas the extra enhanced value of zotero in this process i think will be that it will be able to function as the equivalent of the reference or citation card in luman's zettle casting system even more effectively and this will be very valuable to me once i begin outputting my next big project the white pine lumber book and the question that has been in the back of my mind since i first heard about this beta of course is does this mean i no longer need margin note 3. now margin o3 has a boatload of features and a fairly steep learning curve to go with them the thing is i don't actually use most of those features it's sort of like some of the other apps that i've been playing around with such as notability i've watched a bunch of videos on people's very cool margin note 3 and notability workflows especially medical students like samuel suresh and roxy at paperlessx and ali abdal as a result i'm pretty much sold on the superiority of notability over good notes for example however i still use good notes because i already know how to use it and i don't need to make the elaborate and artistic types of pages that these people are making and showing on youtube and although i was a very early user of livescribe i've never yet since i've discovered notability had that capability needed to record a lecture while i'm taking notes so while i wish that the app had been available when i was a student i don't really use it now but that's a digression my point with zotero and margin note 3 is that i was using margin note mostly to highlight and ante pdfs the mind map feature was a bonus but i don't really find myself using it extensively to process my thoughts about the things that i've read i sort of feel like it's more aesthetic than functional since i'm ultimately going to reread these highlights and notes and move the ones that i want to preserve into obsidian and once i've done that does it even make sense for me to retain those notes and those highlighted pdfs in yet another database and in a proprietary format cloud-based one that i have to pay rent for as well the good news is i can export the pdfs that i've highlighted in margin note 3 as well as the list of the highlights and notes themselves so i'm not going to lose the work that i've done in margin note 3. as long as i remember to make those transfers before i stop renewing my subscription i'm not saying that i've decided yet that i'm going to dump margin o3 but i do suspect that as i get closer to the annual renewal dates on some of these apps that i've been trying this year i'm going to assess whether they're adding value to my work i'll have more to say about that as i begin making those decisions for now i'm really excited about zotero and i think it is going to meet a lot of my needs and as i gain experience with that i'll report on that as well so i hope people found this a little bit interesting thanks very much for listening i'll see you again

Channel: History4Today - Notes, Research, Writing

Views: 2,021

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Zotero, Margin Note, MarginNote 3, PKM, Note-taking, iPad Apps

Id: y7C0mcN-sXc

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021