Zotero is a powerful, freely available reference manager that runs as a plugin to the Firefox web browser. It is capable of capturing citation details directly from many online archives and library sites – and with the appropriate plugins for Open Office or Word, it is also capable of inserting correctly formatted citations directly into documents, with dynamic adjustments to citation form during editing. Together, these features greatly improve the efficiency of the writing process, allowing the author to spend more time concentrating on the main text. But if you’re reading this page, you probably already know that.

This was the distribution page for an experimental version of Zotero, modified to support the Bluebook citation style. The experimental version provided some ehancements that helped with Bluebook support, but interfered with some other, and important, features of mainstream Zotero. Syncronization (sync) does not work in the modified version. That’s probably enough said.

Meanwhile, functionality necessary to support the Bluebook style is slowly coming up in mainstream Zotero. By early next year (early 2010), most of what is necessary to support Bluebook referencing in Zotero should be in place.

The modified version has therefore been removed from the Web, and is being preserved for posterity in a separate location. If you are running an instance of “Zotero LeX”, and it contains data that you would like to move forward to mainstream Zotero, feel free to send mail via the link at the bottom of this page for assistance.

If after reading through the notes above you would like to give the Bluebook support a whirl, you can install the software by clicking on the link above. After installing the software, you can receive updates in the usual way, through the Firefox update manager.

Enjoy!

Frank Bennett