On November 16 I started working on the Visualizing Caribbean Literary Encounters project. It was my first time working on a project like this and I was pretty excited to get started.


We were currently on the first stage of the project and that comprised of looking for all the different books which were written by Caribbean authors and putting the information of the book into a Zotero folder for easy access. All of the members were given a time range to search for the books and I was given the years 1991-2000. I started to look for books on amazon but quickly found out that I was not able to find a majority of the books that a particular author had written. So I decided to move the search over to WorldCat. WorldCat is an open-source, global catalog of library collections which you can search for books, music, video, etc. On WorldCat, I was able to search for the Caribbean authors, look for all the books they wrote and the different versions of a particular book more efficiently than looking for it on amazon.


WorldCat had an advanced search function where the user can search for an author and then a particular year they wrote books, but I found this to be less efficient than just searching for the author regularly in the search bar and putting all the books I found into Zotero. Furthermore, by doing this I was able to get more books since I was not only looking for them in my year range. When doing this the first problem I faced was duplicating a book that another member already had put into the Zotero folder, but thankfully that was easily fixed since Zotero had a function to where the user can merge 2 items that are the same.


Zotero has also been a big help with its having a browser extension in which the user can save a book or article by clicking a button and Zotero enters all the necessary information about that book in an organized format.