Whether you are a publisher of a scientific journal, operate a news site, or are a blogger, Zotero users will be eternally grateful if you expose bibliographic metadata on your website.

In your decision to expose metadata, it is important to know what is the object of interest: the webpage itself (e.g. a page on a newspaper's website showing a article), or the resources described on the webpage (e.g. a page of a library catalog showing bibliographic records).

The easiest way to expose bibliographic metadata is to use one of the several web applications that have this capability out-of-the-box, or offer it through minimal configuration or plugins. These include the content management systems Omeka and WordPress, and the web-based bibliographic managers refbase and Bebop BibTeX publisher.

Zotero-compatible OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) software packages for libraries, archives, and museums include:

• SIRSI
• Aleph
• DRA
• Dynix
• Evergreen
• GEAC
• InnoPAC
• Koha
• TLC/YouSeeMore
• Voyager (WebVoyage)
• VTLS

Alternatively, you can allow Zotero (and other clients) to use your information by using one or more of the open standards listed below:

• Embedded RDF
• COinS: According to the COinS website, “COinS (ContextObjects in Spans) is a simple, ad hoc community specification for publishing OpenURL references in HTML.” If the somewhat limited and inflexible categories of information available in OpenURL are suitable for your needs, using COinS is a relatively easy and lightweight means of making your data available to Zotero. For dynamic sites, see COinS in PHP, and for static pages, see the COinS Generator.
• unAPI: As described on the unAPI website, “unAPI is a tiny HTTP API for the few basic operations necessary to copy discrete, identified content from any kind of web application.” For our purposes, unAPI allows you to serve up bibliographic information in a variety of different bibliographic formats for Zotero to automatically ingest.
• MODS XML, developed by the Library of Congress, is probably the richest standard format available.
• The older, flat MARC format is also supported, and can be used if your application already generates it.
• Zotero/Dublin-Core-like RDF is also supported; Zotero is able to import the most information from Zotero-generated RDF, but the ontology is still subject to change and it has not yet been adopted by others. While other “legacy” flat file formats (BibTeX, RIS, and Bibix/EndNote(R)/Refer) offer a much more limited import, code library support is very good and they are simpler to generate.

Exposing bibliographic metadata through an open standard is very powerful (and also benefits non-Zotero users!). However, if you have little control over the way your website is build, you may have to create a Zotero web translator for Zotero-compatibility. Translators have some downsides: apart from the fact that they are a Zotero-specific solution, translators can break easily if the structure of the targeted website changes. An advantage is that translators can easily attach related content when saving metadata (e.g. a translator can save the full-text PDF along the bibliographic metadata of a scientific paper).