In June, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens announced that it was releasing bibliographic citation data for more than 1,500 articles published in its journal Hesperia via the bibliographic resource Zotero. As publications director, Andrew Reinhard, explained this decision:
“Researchers who use Zotero while writing articles and books that reference Hesperia articles can download citation data by visiting the ASCSA’s group page. You can choose to browse the collection of articles from 1932 to 2012 by volume year, or you can search with keywords across all articles.
When you find a citation you need, you can download that data to your own collection of research bibliography. Zotero will automatically format it in the style of your choice (e.g., Chicago Manual of Style). Citation data include article title/subtitle, author, abstract, volume/issue/page numbers, and publication date….”
The decision is part of a broader move by the publications office of the ASCSA to make the research of its journal and monographs as widely available as possible, and was followed by an announcement in July to provide open access to more than 1,500 articles published between 1932 and the present (minus a 3-year embargo). For some perspective on the vision of the publications office, check out “Archaeological Publication and Linked Data” or watch this 15 minute video interview with Andrew Reinhard about digital and print publications (start at the 9 minute mark for a discussion of Zotero and open access).
The two decisions—to adopt Zotero and provide open access to journal articles—will clearly benefit anyone interested in Corinth, most especially the broader public lacking access to the articles through JSTOR. As the ASCSA’s investigations in the Corinthia have been ongoing for over a century, there are literally hundreds of articles and monographs published by the Princeton office with text, photos, plans, and maps related to Corinth’s history and archaeology.
The Zotero group library currently allows one to search by article and volume title. When tags and abstracts are added (volunteers needed!), the library will be fully searchable. Currently the references in the library link to JSTOR, which require institutional access, but these should soon be updated to link directly to the PDF copies of the articles at the ASCSA website.
If you don’t use Zotero, now is the time to learn. Zotero is far superior to simply dumping bibliography into a Word document for numerous reasons. As the Zotero website puts it, “Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.” Developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Zotero “automatically senses content” while you browse and allows you to create a library of citations to books, articles, dissertations, websites through simply clicking the mouse. That content is then searchable via title, abstract, or the text of the documents in the library. For a brief overview on Zotero, watch this 3-minute video.
I used Zotero several years ago but abandoned it when I started browsing through Google Chrome (Zotero depended at the time on a Firefox plug-in). Then Version 3 arrived last year as a stand-alone, and with connectors to browsers like Google Chrome. The new version also has the expanded capacity to build bibliographic libraries through groups, which one can restrict to a few collaborators or make publically visible.
I have slowly been building a Corinth library through Zotero and hope to release it in stages over the next few months. If you’d like to collaborate in building a Corinthia bibliography through Zotero, contact me.
Corinthian Matters 
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