IN-PERSON ONLY Research Synthesis & Discovery: AI-Augmented Zotero(2 Hours)

Instructors:
Jeremy Boggs - Library
Christine J Ruotolo - Library

Maggie Nunley - Library
Rebecca Coleman - Library

This workshop treats bibliographic management as a research method, not a housekeeping task. Using Model Context Protocol connections to Zotero, participants configure local AI access to their own citation libraries , data stays on your machine, and work through concrete tasks: mapping conceptual relationships across a citation graph, pulling patterns from years of accumulated annotations, and surfacing connections between sources that never appeared in the same search result. We situate these workflows in the full research lifecycle, asking where AI-augmented knowledge management fits alongside disciplinary methods training and research data governance. In roughly 90 minutes to two hours, you will leave with functional infrastructure and at least one working prototype for literature review writing, grant narrative development, or course preparation.

Leave with: Configured MCP connection, working prompt templates for citation network analysis and note synthesis, and a framework for integrating AI-assisted knowledge management into your research methodology.

Who Should Take This:

Zotero users with 100+ items suffering from "bibliographic debt" (duplicates, orphaned PDFs, messy metadata from years of imports)

Privacy-conscious researchers wanting AI-assisted workflows that stay strictly local (no data uploaded to cloud AI services)

Technically comfortable with installing Node.js, editing JSON config files, and troubleshooting beta software alongside the facilitator

Not For: Zotero beginners, or researchers with locked-down institutional laptops (cannot install software or enable local HTTP ports).