I’m one of the many beta testers for Zotero and have been working with one version or another of this software for several months. I see on Dan Cohen’s blog that the public beta release is just a week or so away. Get ready.
Beyond developing what I think is a really great piece of software, the Zotero group is also interested in building a community of users and developers around the product. Like Firefox 2 (which uses SQLite to store bookmarks and browser history), Zotero is built around an SQLite database that lives on your local computer. A smart decision for Zotero’s purposes, but it also opens a low-barrier door to those interested in playing around with creation of add-on services for the product.
For example, I’m not all that interested in leveraging the “social” aspects of Zotero (tagging and swapping entries and the like) but I do have an interest in syncing my Zotero database across multiple computers—like I now do with my various Yojimbo databases. My initial work on extending Zotero will focus on developing a similar capability (of course, I’ll have to learn how to code this sort of thing first so I’m sure progress will be slow).
To begin getting a handle on the Zotero database structure, there are a number of open-source and commercial products that support SQLite databases. I’ll recommend starting with SQLite Browser on SourceForge. The latest version works well with the Zotero database and it’s available for Windows, Linux and OSX.
I tried using the sqlite3 command line utility that’s installed in /usr/bin on Mac OSX (version 3.1.3 on 10.4) but that didn’t work—complained about an invalid file type. Tried Fink but there’s no binary distribution of sqlite3 available. Went to DarwinPorts and after installing the latest version and issuing the “port selfupdate” command, I grabbed the latest version of sqlite3 with a simple “port install sqlite3.” This version (3.3.7) opened the Zotero file with no problems (as the little graphic illustrates).
Let me also suggest that you not have Firefox running when you poke around your Zotero datastore—SQLite does perform an exclusive lock on the whole file for any writes but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Looking forward to what I hope will be the public beta release next week…