Tutorial: Export a Zotero collection to RDF

Zotero is a tool for collecting and managing bibliographic data. Zotero is especially useful as a data collection tool for computational humanities, since it is quite good at scraping metadata and (when
available) full-text documents from databases like Google Scholar, JSTOR, and PubMed.

For an introduction to collecting bibliographic metadata and full-text content with Zotero, see Building a Text Collection with Zotero.

In order to work with your Zotero collection in external applications, you will first need to export it in Zotero RDF format.

To export a collection:

1. Select the collection from your Library.
2. Right-click on the collection, and select "Export Collection". A small modal dialog should appear.
3. Select "Zotero RDF" from the Format field.
4. If you want to parse full-text content (e.g. from attached PDF files), check
   the "Export Files" option.
5. Click OK. An Export (save) dialog should appear.
6. Navigate to the place on your filesystem to which you wish to export your
   collection. Put it someplace easy to find, since you'll need to know the path
   to your export later on.
7. Give your export a name in the "Save As" field.
8. Click OK.

This will create a new directory with the name that you specified in step 7. Inside, you should find a file with the same name, and a ``.rdf`` extension. If you opted to include attached files (step 4), you should also see a folder called "files".