Il y a quelques mois, l’équipe de zotero a eu l’excellente idée de publier une API en lecture et écriture. Grâce à elle, zotero est devenu mobile. Cette évolution montre la puissance de l’open...

Frédéric Clavert

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![Logo de
Zandy](http://zotero.hypotheses.org/files/2011/12/unnamed.png){decoding="async"
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Logo de Zandy, logiciel développé par Avram Lyon
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Il y a quelques mois, l'équipe de zotero a eu l'excellente idée de
publier une API en lecture et écriture. [Grâce à elle, zotero est devenu
mobile](http://zotero.hypotheses.org/381). Cette évolution montre la
puissance de l'open source pour le secteur universitaire: l'open source
s'accompagne de la création d'une communauté qui a la possibilité
d'accéder à la source du logiciel, d'intervenir sur la manière dont il
est développé et, ainsi, d'adapter les logiciels open source aux besoins
de la recherche de chacun. L'interview qui suit est celle d'Avram Lyon,
développeur de Zandy, un client zotero pour Android. Vous pouvez
[télécharger Zandy sur l'Android
Market](https://market.android.com/details?id=com.gimranov.zandy.app) et
lire son *[guide
d'utilisation](http://www.gimranov.com/avram/w/zandy-user-guide).*

**Could you describe who you are in a few words?**

I'm a graduate student in Slavic languages and literatures at the
University of California, Los Angeles, where I study Tatar and other
non-Russian literatures of the late Russian empire. I also teach Russian
and a little Tatar. And I caught the Zotero bug back in 2008, when I
started graduate school, and started writing translators and helping out
on the forums.

**Why do you use Zotero?**

I started using Zotero because I couldn't imagine doing citations by
hand in this day and age. I've kept using it because it makes it
possible to automate and streamline the repetitive parts of research,
and because the community around it promises great things to come.

**What is Zandy?**

Zandy is an Android app to help people keep up on their research without
needing a full-fledged computer. It supports viewing and editing items
in your Zotero library, as well as viewing attachments and notes. The
next big goal is to support adding and modifying attachments, which will
let us do cool things like use the camera to scan and upload documents.
The source code is open and available under the same license as Zotero
itself, so I'm hoping it will manage to generate an active user
community of its own.

**Why did you decide to develop it?**

I decided to develop Zandy because I kept mentioning in the Zotero
forums and developer listserv that an Android app would really not be
that hard to write. One day in late August, I decided that I might as
well do it myself. I suppose at first it was for the challenge and the
experience of making a mobile app. I don't actually use an Android

device myself yet --- Zandy was developed using my wife's phone --- but
I'm confident that it will prove useful for me, too, when I finally get
a phone or tablet for myself.

**As a researcher in social and human sciences, in which way do you
think that coding is necessary to your research?**

I think that coding is often necessary for me to keep up on the volume
of sources that I use; my work in libraries and archives in Russia was
greatly helped by having Zotero, and by having efficient ways to get
large numbers of items, images, and annotations into the software. My
research requires a lot of primary source materials that have no digital
presence, and I'm trying to rectify that, and further my own research at
the same time. I am working on spatial and relationship analyses of
non-Russian writing in the late imperial period, and that

entails having well-structured, voluminous data.

And, I must admit, coding is a lot of fun. Especially when I see that
it's helping hundreds or thousands of other researchers around the
globe.


Logo de Zandy, logiciel développé par Avram Lyon  Il y a quelques mois, l’équipe de zotero a eu l’excellente idée de publier une API en lecture et écriture. Grâce à elle, zotero est devenu mobile.

Messages de Rogue Scholar

Interview d’Avram Lyon, développeur de Zandy, client zotero pour Android