Legal Research

Help Needed to Develop Bluebook Citation Style for Zotero

I received an email yesterday from Frank Bennet who has been leading the development of a Bluebook citation style for Zotero. Zotero is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Currently, Zotero only offers a beta version of the Bluebook citation style which is pretty limited.

But, Frank tells me that now "Zotero has acquired the basic capabilities needed for legal writing." He adds:

From this point, the project will benefit greatly from the input of actual legal writers. Unfortunately, there are very few lawyers in the Zotero community at present, for the obvious-enough reason that Zotero has until now not been terribly useful for things legal...

I would be looking for people who are comfortable with a few basic technical things (installing Firefox, installing plugins), who are able to invest a small amount of time playing with software with limited and occasionally broken functionality, and who have the patience to report a bit of detail when things do not work correctly-- beta testers for alpha software.

If you're willing to help out, contact Frank Bennett. See also the Zotero-legal Google group - a forum for discussion and a repository of notes and proposals.

Full post as published by WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library on June 30, 2010 (boomark / email).