Making WordPress Content Available to Zotero

If you’re reading this entry on the Zotero website rather than through an online feed reader, then you might have noticed the appearance of one of our signature icons in your address bar. The Zotero blog, we’re happy to announce, is now Zotero-compatible.

CHNM has created a new plugin for WordPress, the popular blog publishing platform, that makes blog content visible to Zotero. The plugin allows Zotero to detect all relevant bibliographic metadata for blog entries, including item type, title, author, date, and tags. (Please note, however, that unless you’re running a dev build later than 1118, the blog title won’t be imported until our next release). To make your WordPress blog Zotero-readable, simply unzip and upload the directory to your WordPress plugins folder. Then activate the plugin from within your WordPress admin panel.

The plugin works by embedding a standardized tag in each blog post, known as a COinS tag. COinS–or Context Objects in Spans–is a community-based standard for encoding bibliographic information in web pages. By installing the plugin, you make it possible for not only Zotero, but also other COinS interpreters to recognize and process your metadata, thereby supporting a new generation of semantic web tools and services. Other sites that currently embed COinS include Wikipedia and WorldCat.

The WP plugin is part of a larger effort on the part of the Zotero team to document best practices for exposing metadata. If you’re a self-publisher or content-provider who wishes to create a Zotero-friendly website, please continue to watch this space in the months ahead.

Of Related Interest
Peter Binkley’s WordPress extension: allows you to automatically insert a COinS link to a reference cited in a blog post.

COinS generator: as described by its authors, this tool “will take bibliographic metadata for a citation and produce a ‘COinS’, i.e. a snippet of HTML that can be placed on a webpage and processed by web tools.” The generator has been used to insert COinS metadata in the online publication of A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). (Please note, however, that Eric Hellman’s generator currently embeds extra metadata for the first author of a multi-authored book, article, or other resource that must be manually edited before the information can be accurately imported by Zotero.)

Structured blogging plugins for WordPress and Movable Type: as the authors write, “the difference between a typical blog post and a structured entry is that the Structured Blogging content is published in machine-readable format, so that other services can understand it. Indeed it builds on RSS and Atom standards.”

Dublin Core Metadata Editor: automatically generates DC tags for websites. These tags can be read by Zotero.