Archive for February, 2008

If you are looking for a Zotero-ready open source web platform for publishing collections online, then today is your lucky day. The Center for History and New Media launched the public beta of Omeka to provide museums, historical societies, libraries and individuals with an easy-to-use platform for publishing collections and creating attractive, standards-based, interoperable online exhibits.

Omeka’s WordPress-like approach to collection and exhibition publishing makes it easy to rapidly develop and launch high-gloss sites, and its plug-in architecture makes it flexible. In particular, all installs of Omeka come pre-bundled with a COinS plugin, which embeds metadata derived from the Dublin Core fields associated with individual items. This means that all installs of the public beta are Zotero-ready “off the rack” without any tweaking. Beyond offering interoperability between our resources, this software makes it easier than ever for individuals and institutions with limited budgets to share their content online with Zotero users around the world.

The Zotero community has translated Zotero into 26 different languages. People around the world are using Zotero in everything from Arabic to Vietnamese. In an effort to better support Zotero’s growing non-English user communities, we are asking bilingual community members to translate our quick start guide into additional languages. Zotero already boasts three quick start guide translations, Rintze Zelle’s Dutch translation, Harald Kliems’s German translation and Anaclet Pons’s Spanish translation, each of which is an excellent model for translating our documentation. If you would like to put your language skills to work for the Zotero project and contribute a translation of the quick start guide, please contact campus-reps(at)zotero.org. You might even get a t-shirt and some stickers.

Zotero is now compatible with LibraryThing and CiteULike. Users can now capture bibliographic information from both lists of references and individual items in CiteULike and information about any individual book in their LibraryThing collection. As always, compatibility with new sites and tools brings Zotero closer to its goal of supporting seamless online research. In this case, it is particularly exciting to see closer connections between web tools built for managing books and research materials.

Zotero 1.0.3 is now available. In addition to supporting thirteen more sites and resolving an assortment of bugs with word processor integration, 1.0.3 offers some new features for sharing bibliographies on the web.

It is now easier than ever to insert bibliographic information into blog posts, forum discussions, and web pages. Through Zotero’s export preferences (shown below) you can now include HTML markup in drag and drop bibliographies. To include HTML in your drag and drop bibliographies, all you need to do is check the new “Copy as HTML” box on the export pane of your Zotero preferences.

Beyond adding HTML to style your references, this feature will also embed metadata in COinS with many of the most popular item types. This turns your drag and drop bibliographies into smart bibliographies. Anyone who comes across your references on the web will be able to instantly capture them and add them to their Zotero collections.

From the Preferences pane you can also configure site-specific settings to use specific styles and preferences for different domain paths. Site-specific settings allow you to set different preferences for the different sites you edit. For example you can set a preference to use Wikipedia citation templates automatically at Wikipedia.org, or set it to use MLA style and include HTML for bibliographies that you include on your blog. To add a site-specific setting, click the plus sign at the bottom of the Preferences pane. Then enter the Domain/Path that you want the specific settings applied to and choose your style. If you want to include HTML, then simply check the “Copy as HTML” box.

You can see the full changelog for 1.0.3 here.