Archive for the 'News' Category

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.

On the eve of our RC1 release, we would like to take the opportunity to thank our user and developer community for its tremendous contribution to the Zotero project. Because so many different groups use and develop Zotero, it’s not always immediately apparent where or when the work is happening. Moreover, as an open project, there is no clear line separating developers from advocates. As a result, a great deal of Zotero thinking and developing often transpires away from zotero.org: at other institutions, in other blogs, and (increasingly frequently) in other languages. All of the following areas have benefited greatly from community participation, and we hope that many more Zotero users will consider joining these efforts or striking out in new directions. We are fortunate to have such a vibrant community of users, and we are optimistic that it will only grow as Zotero matures into a 1.0 release and beyond.

Z Forums
Since October the forums have received more than 1300 posts in 372 distinct threads requesting features, providing feedback, and identifying bugs. Although our core team actively participates in the forums, the forums are hardly a one-way street where users ask and the core team answers. Tremendous community involvement helps to resolve many support questions and other requests: two posters, noksagt and bdarcus, have already contributed more than 50 comments each.

Core Development and Utilities
Zotero’s ticketing system and development roadmap has been open since November to anyone with a registered account. As of this week, it now also offers anonymous browse access. Anyone interested in learning more about the development process or willing to tackle an outstanding ticket is strongly encouraged to join the effort.

Zotero’s open API encourages the creation of utilities layered on top of the core code. Currently there are several teams of developers working to integrate Zotero with popular social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and reference management sites like Connotea. If you are interested in creating a new utility, please see the relevant documentation.

Site Translators
Since our first beta release last autumn, our user community has tested Zotero with hundreds of library sites and other online resources, and more than a hundred messages to translators@zotero.org have detailed the results of their efforts.

Zotero now includes dozens of new translators added with the help of our user community, with several entirely written by users like Robert Forkel and Syma. Earlier this month we released Scaffold, an IDE that encourages rapid translator testing and development, and we hope to see even more user-contributed translators soon.

International Support
Zotero currently includes 11 foreign locales, with another two already completed and in the pipeline for RC1 (Traditional Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese). All these locales are user-contributed through BabelZilla and more are already underway (Danish, Hebrew, Turkish). If you have any foreign language abilities, please contribute to the translation effort underway.

Advocates of Zotero have produced user guides in French, German, and Japanese. As we continue to add international locales, we hope to see more foreign-language documentation soon.

Blogs and Reviews
Zotero’s user base continues to grow rapidly, largely thanks to the efforts of our worldwide advocates. For example, the term “Zotero” now appears on more than half a million web pages, up from just 1 before the project went public last October. Thousands of bloggers have shared their Zotero experiences with their readers, and we are grateful for their outreach.