Archive for the 'News' Category

About ten seconds after the initial excitement died down, questions regarding Zotero Everywhere‘s release date started rolling in. While we’re not quite ready to provide a firm timetable, we’re happy to report that within days of our announcement our skilled team already had alpha code for standalone Zotero in hand and accessible via our fully open code repository. This software currently requires users to jump through a few tricky hoops to build and install, but within the next few weeks we’ll package an alpha release that’s more easily accessible to bleeding edge testers and developers.

In the meantime, I’d like to offer a peek at what we have so far. All core functionality, including server sync and integration with Microsoft Word, is already in place. And the most exciting part of standalone Zotero, integration with other browsers, is well underway. Here are a few screenshots of the code in action just a few moments ago. I’ve added a couple of red circles to draw attention to the new import icons in Chrome and Safari, but otherwise this is exactly what the software looks like now.

Integration with Google Chrome. Note the Zotero folder icon, just like in Firefox! Search results work beautifully.

Integration with Apple Safari. We’ve customized Zotero to take advantage of Safari’s distinctive look and feel, and here we’re grabbing a newspaper article.

Standalone Zotero showing the above items after one-click import. I actually had Chrome and Safari open and firing items at Zotero simultaneously.

Along with standalone Zotero, work is progressing rapidly with Zotero Everywhere’s expanded API, as well. Stay tuned for more news on that front soon!

We’re delighted to announce Zotero Everywhere, a major new initiative generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Zotero Everywhere is aimed at dramatically increasing the accessibility of Zotero to the widest possible range of users today and in the future. Zotero Everywhere will have two main components: a standalone desktop version of Zotero with full integration into a variety of web browsers and a radically expanded application programming interface (API) to provide web and mobile access to Zotero libraries.

Zotero is the only research software that provides full and seamless access to a comprehensive range of open and gated resources. With a single click, Zotero users have long been able to add a complete journal article, book, or other resource to their personal libraries, including bibliographic metadata and attached files like PDFs. Until now, this powerful functionality has been tied exclusively to the Firefox browser, which not all researchers can or want to use. Today we are announcing support for Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Internet Explorer, which account for 98% of the web’s usage share. Plugins for these browsers will soon allow users to add anything they find on the web to their Zotero libraries with a single click, regardless of the their browser preferences. Rather than use the Zotero pane in Firefox, users will have the new option of accessing their libraries via a standalone desktop version of Zotero, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Zotero’s web API offers any application developer the ability to access individual and group libraries via a simple, human-readable programming interface. Until now, this API has been “read-only” — users could view their libraries but they could not change them via the web or via the API. Today we’re announcing the opening of Zotero’s write API to the public over the coming months. Because Zotero “eats its own dog food” — we already use the very same programming interface to serve pages at zotero.org — application developers can be confident that the public API will ultimately provide all the same functionality used internally at the Zotero project. With full read/write access to bibliographic data, attached files like PDFs, and the citation formatting engine, developers will be able to integrate a full range of Zotero features into their own web, mobile, and desktop applications, and users will be able to take advantage of this functionality at zotero.org.

Zotero Everywhere responds to the constantly changing needs of Zotero’s enormous research community. Downloaded millions of times since 2006 and used by hundreds of thousands of researchers daily, Zotero has grown to the world’s largest and most diverse online research community, with nearly 50 million library items presently synced to zotero.org. In addition to sharing their own individual libraries, Zotero users have formed over 25,000 collaborative research groups to pool references, share files, and coauthor manuscripts. By providing new ways of accessing and integrating this vast array of data, Zotero Everywhere will ensure that Zotero continues to be the catalyst for the next generation of research and scholarship.

Zotero’s sorting functions make it easy to quickly find items in your library. At any moment you can click on the headers in your middle columns to sift through your library and organize it according to any of 16 different data fields.

Sorting through your Zotero library from zotero on Vimeo.

To sort items in a collection, click on any of the information categories at the top of the middle column. For example, if you click on “Title,” all your items will be sorted alphabetically by title. If you click on “Title” again, the order will be reversed. Similarly, if you click on “Creator,” your items will be sorted alphabetically by creator, and if you click “Creator,” again the order will be reversed.

To sort by other categories, you can click on the icon in the top right corner of your center column. You will then see the dropdown menu illustrated to the right. Select any additional categories you would like to use for sorting. They will now appear in the center column and you can click on them to sort in just the same way you did with “Title” and “Creator”.

Two tips for sorting:

Sorting works in any view: All of Zotero’s finding and organizing features cascade. So, sorting like this works for basic search results, inside a collection, or when viewing all items with a particular tag. Moreover, sorting will work in any combination of tags, searches, and collections.

Sort to find duplicates: Sorting by title or creator can work as a great way to identify duplicates in your library. Before you delete a duplicate check which collections they are in. To see all the collections containing an item, select the item and then hold down the “Option” key on Macs the “Control” key on Windows, or the “Alt” key on Linux. This will highlight all collections that contain the selected item.

Maps are cool. Scratch that, maps are amazing. We here at Zotero are always trying to think up new ways to let you play with and visualize your library. So we jumped at the chance to visualize our libraries in a maps. We are excited to announce the release of the Zotero Maps plugin, available here. Developed by Entropy Free LLC and the Zotero project, this plugin allows Zotero users to browse their collections through geographic relationships among their items. In other words, to map your library and use those maps as navigation for your library. You can see it in action in the image below.

Once you install the plugin you can generate a map from a drop down in the Actions menu (the gear icon). This will prompt you to chose which fields you want Zotero Maps to search through for geographic terms to Map. Once you have selected the terms, the software will generate a map in your browser window. Zotero Maps uses OpenStreetMap to construct the map, and you can pan, zoom in and out, and drag your way around the map. You can also click on any of the pins in your map to see all of the items associated with that location.

What makes Zotero Maps particularly awesome is that it allows you to mine different individual information fields for place information. As shown in the image below, you can search any combination of item titles, tags, places of publication, abstracts, and your notes. Most excitingly, Zotero Maps can automatically extract locations appearing in the text of your PDFs and then plot these places on a map.

Potential Use Cases:
Map Your Collection By Key Places:
Many records from library catalogs and journal databases come pre-loaded with geographic keywords. Zotero Maps lets you quickly see the relationships between the terms catalogers, authors, and publishers have assigned to the items in your collection. Similarly, as you apply your own geographic tags to items you can then explore those geographic relationships. Whether you’re looking at key locations in studies of avian flu, ethnographic work in the American southwest, or the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the tags associated with your items provide valuable geographic information.

Map Places of Publication:
In many cases places of publication include crucial information about your items. If your working on a project involving the history of the book, how different media outlets cover an issue, or how different journals present distinct scientific points of view, the places in which those items are published can provide valuable insight.