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Explorations in 
Bibliography
Zotero Goes Public
Gregory Morrison, Wheaton College

ABSTR ACT The publishing of scholarly bibliographies has diminished 
significantly over the past two decades for an obvious reason: access to 
bibliographic tools via the Internet. But this has not marked the end alto-
gether of research-level bibliographies, which are still vital to the pres-
ervation and advancement of knowledge. Research bibliographies are 
finding a new home online, and open source tools are now available to 
help scholars and librarians reestablish this genre in dynamic fashion. This 
listen and learn session discussed one such project that deploys Zotero, 
Tablesorter, and Libguides to serve a targeted group of users.

The core components of my session are Zotero, LibGuides, BibBase, 
and Tablesorter. Zotero has emerged as the “darling” reference 
management program. I will assume that everyone present is famil-
iar already with Springshare’s LibGuide program. It serves as the 
public interface for presenting the bibliographies that I will intro-
duce in a minute. BibBase (https://bibbase.org) takes advantage of 
Zotero’s API to enable researchers to “set up and maintain a scien-
tific publications page,” while Tablesorter (https://mottie.github.
io/tablesorter/docs/) is described as “a jQuery plug-in [that] can 
successfully parse and sort many types of data including linked 
data in a cell.” Tablesorter and BibBase offer alternative solutions 
for publishing bibliographies to the web. BibBase is very simple 
to use and requires no coding or programming knowledge. Table-
sorter, in contrast, exists as open-source code that one can “fork” 
from GitHub and customize, which is what we did at Wheaton and 
named it “BibTable.” We offer the code for BibTable to anyone here 
who wants to use it.

https://bibbase.org
https://mottie.github.io/tablesorter/docs/
https://mottie.github.io/tablesorter/docs/


Listen and Learn  207

Before I launch into the details of how these tools work and work 
together, allow me a brief historical excursus. If you imagined that the 
number of printed bibliographies has declined since the 1990s when 
the Internet took off, you would be correct. According to a search 
in WorldCat, the heyday for bibliographies was between 1960 and 
1980, when approximately 115,000 bibliographies were published. 
Since 2000, the number of printed bibliographies dropped to around 
19,000. The decline was predictable, of course, as researchers 
could rely increasingly on resources like WorldCat, Google Scholar, 
and article databases to quickly generate customized, up-to-date 
lists of references. Many of the published bibliographies from the 
mid-twentieth century (I can confirm this from a recent weeding 
project) were little more than lists of references, but others provided 
an introduction to that area of scholarship and included annotations 
to some or all of the titles. I found some of these works worth keeping 
for their value to the study of academic disciplines and publishing 
and their potential usefulness to subject bibliographers. 

The bibliography as a genre has found some life in the digital 
space. Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) seems to be the most 
significant effort to date. Also, though not easy to identify, research-
level bibliographies are available on the Internet. One example is a 
web site devoted to the study of the early church figure, Evagrius 
Ponticus, available at http://evagriusponticus.net/index.htm. This 
is an actively curated research guide that is maintained by Joel 
Kalvesmaki at Dumbarton Oaks and has an advisory board made 
up of scholars at other institutions including Harvard and Catholic 
University of America and on that basis considers itself a “peer-
reviewed publication.” 

With the exception of being peer-reviewed, the Evagrius guide 
represents the model I have followed for my research guide on the 
integration of faith and learning in evangelical higher education. 
In its original conception, the guide aimed to be a “prolegomenon” 
for the study of Christian faith and learning. That goal proved to be 
too ambitious, and I revised the guide several years later to target 
a more specific user group, namely, newer Wheaton faculty who, if 
on a tenure track, are required to write a “faith and learning paper” 
within the first five or six years in order to receive tenure and 
promotion to the associate professor rank. The second target group 

http://evagriusponticus.net/index.htm


208  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

remained administrators at other Christian colleges—especially 
such schools abroad—who are interested in establishing a faculty 
faith and learning program similar to Wheaton’s. A review of hits on 
the site revealed, in fact, an international interest in the content of 
the guide. My suggestion to you is to consider likewise what unique 
research interests your institution may have around which you can 
develop this kind of resource.

As for the execution of such a research bibliography, Zotero 
functions as the database. You simply create a folder for whatever 
bibliography you want to build and publish. At the BibBase web 
site, you are invited to “Get your BibBase Page” and Zotero is one 
of several source options. Clicking on the Zotero link, you will be 
prompted to log into the web version of Zotero. Each collection (i.e., 
folder) appears with another link. Once you click on the specific 
collection, the bibliography is generated along with three options for 
embedding it in a web page including Javascript, PHP, and iFrame. 
Javascript is the “easiest.” The code is provided for you to cut and 
paste into the page; I work in LibGuides as my web editor but one can 
use whatever platform is available that supports basic world wide 
web protocols. Zotero-BibBase-Libguides is the easiest package 
for starters. View a sample page at https://wheaton.libguides.com/
onlinebibs_atla2019. I chose to replace BibBase with TableSorter 
because of some functionality issues with BibBase in the LibGuides 
environment but it did require involving a library colleague with 
greater expertise in coding. As I mentioned earlier, this colleague 
modified the code from GitHub and this code is available upon 
request. Send the request to research.help@wheaton.edu. 

I want to end by saying more about the content of the public 
bibliographies on the faith and learning research guide at http://
wheaton.libguides.com/faithandlearning. I worked to identify the 
journals and magazines that publish “integrative” works. Christian 
Scholar’s Review and Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science are prime 
examples. Some but not all of the integrative periodicals I selected 
are indexed in one or more databases. Others are not indexed 
anywhere. So, I committed to building (in a Zotero collection) an 
index to the selected journals, which represents the most time-
consuming part of maintaining the guide and keeping it up-to-date. 
I must confess that I’m not doing so well to keep this commitment. 

https://wheaton.libguides.com/onlinebibs_atla2019
https://wheaton.libguides.com/onlinebibs_atla2019
mailto:research.help@wheaton.edu
http://wheaton.libguides.com/faithandlearning
http://wheaton.libguides.com/faithandlearning


Listen and Learn  209

Going forward, I need to develop a maintenance schedule and get 
in the habit of conducting searches to update the Zotero folders that 
feed these public bibliographies. Otherwise, more frequent users 
will begin to notice and not return. 


