About a month ago I started hacking around with the Zotero RSS feeds to see if we might be able to use them in in our application development. The idea was that I would develop a library to allow users to collect and manage citations in one of the best citation tools out there, and then integrate the citation reference in to some yet-to-be-developed application. To that end, I whipped up a quick Ruby library, and released it as a gem. PHP also has a Zotero library maintained by Jeremy Boggs. Both of these libraries allow developers to start integrating Zotero into applications in new ways.

So here’s the pitch…let’s get together and expand these libraries and/or build something cool out of them. As an example, for the Ruby library, I would like to implement a COinS decorator for Zotero items. This would allow you to store the item id in a Model (I’ve started an acts_as_citable plugin for this) and then generate COinS in a view with item.to_coins. PHP uses a slightly different idiom, but you could imagine a getCoins() function that would produce the same result.

Anyone up for an old-fashioned hackfest along these lines?