Archive for February, 2007

Every day, more and more users are downloading Zotero and putting it to use in interesting ways. If you’re still on the fence, you don’t have to take our word for it; see what other people are saying about our next-generation research tool:

“If you spend most of your time doing research on the Web, you need Zotero”
Linux.com

Zotero “is perhaps the best Firefox extension that most users have never heard of, unless you are an academic historian or social scientist, in which case Zotero is becoming quite the rage. It is also percolating into other academic fields, including law, math and science.”
AI3

“Every lawyer wants this”
Bankruptcy Practice Pro

“Researchers, students and librarians everywhere wondering how they ever did without it.”
Dead Reckoning

“It is a revolution in how to approach collecting references”
Organic Researcher

“I have been using Zotero for a number of months and I can safely say it’s one of my most favorite research tools. I don’t do this often, but I highly recommend Zotero.”
Home Office Voice

“it makes the whole citation process so quick and intuitive that I wish it had appeared on the scene years ago!”
Household Opera

“It’s the ultimate in digital note card technology.”
Fundanmentals

“Zotero is already an amazing piece of software that could change the way we do history.”
Digital History Hacks

“Groundbreaking. A glimpse of the 21st century scholarly information landscape.”
Matthew G Kirschenbaum

Read more about What People are Saying About Zotero and check back frequently for new comments.

The editors of PC Magazine have voted Zotero one of their top picks for free software in the February 20, 2007, issue. A roundup of the best “tried-and-true” free applications, the cover story singles out Zotero as a must-have Firefox extension. “Our recommendations are the apps that real people use everyday, at work and at home, for all kinds of tasks . . . They’re tried and tested, the best tools you can get, and they’re all free.”

We have collected a set of resources to make it easier for those who appreciate Zotero to spread the word. In the Promote Zotero section of the site you can find Zotero buttons for your website or blog, flyers, handouts, and our introductory screencast in a variety of formats. A big part of what has made Zotero such a successful tool is our vibrant user community. We recognize that whether by talking, blogging, presenting or otherwise discussing Zotero with other people, our users are our best promoters. We want them to have the resources at their fingertips to make spreading Zotero as easy as possible. If you have any requests for other things you would like to see on the Promote Zotero page, please send your requests to trevor@zotero.org.

If you’re reading this entry on the Zotero website rather than through an online feed reader, then you might have noticed the appearance of one of our signature icons in your address bar. The Zotero blog, we’re happy to announce, is now Zotero-compatible.

CHNM has created a new plugin for WordPress, the popular blog publishing platform, that makes blog content visible to Zotero. The plugin allows Zotero to detect all relevant bibliographic metadata for blog entries, including item type, title, author, date, and tags. (Please note, however, that unless you’re running a dev build later than 1118, the blog title won’t be imported until our next release). To make your WordPress blog Zotero-readable, simply unzip and upload the directory to your WordPress plugins folder. Then activate the plugin from within your WordPress admin panel.

The plugin works by embedding a standardized tag in each blog post, known as a COinS tag. COinS–or Context Objects in Spans–is a community-based standard for encoding bibliographic information in web pages. By installing the plugin, you make it possible for not only Zotero, but also other COinS interpreters to recognize and process your metadata, thereby supporting a new generation of semantic web tools and services. Other sites that currently embed COinS include Wikipedia and WorldCat.

The WP plugin is part of a larger effort on the part of the Zotero team to document best practices for exposing metadata. If you’re a self-publisher or content-provider who wishes to create a Zotero-friendly website, please continue to watch this space in the months ahead.

Of Related Interest
Peter Binkley’s WordPress extension: allows you to automatically insert a COinS link to a reference cited in a blog post.

COinS generator: as described by its authors, this tool “will take bibliographic metadata for a citation and produce a ‘COinS’, i.e. a snippet of HTML that can be placed on a webpage and processed by web tools.” The generator has been used to insert COinS metadata in the online publication of A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). (Please note, however, that Eric Hellman’s generator currently embeds extra metadata for the first author of a multi-authored book, article, or other resource that must be manually edited before the information can be accurately imported by Zotero.)

Structured blogging plugins for WordPress and Movable Type: as the authors write, “the difference between a typical blog post and a structured entry is that the Structured Blogging content is published in machine-readable format, so that other services can understand it. Indeed it builds on RSS and Atom standards.”

Dublin Core Metadata Editor: automatically generates DC tags for websites. These tags can be read by Zotero.