Archive for the 'News' Category

We’re delighted to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $440,000 to fund a two-year collaboration between Penn State and George Mason University to develop and assess new Zotero functionality for tracking, organizing, and archiving scholarly publications.

Key new Zotero features will include:

• Feeds in the Zotero application. Users will be able to add RSS and Atom feeds to track their favorite scholarly journals and easily grab new publications by simply dragging them to their Zotero libraries as desired.
• Integration with institutional repositories. The Zotero team will work with the developers behind Penn State’s ScholarSphere institutional repository (IR) to allow Penn State faculty, students, and staff to deposit self-authored works directly into the IR from Zotero. A pluggable architecture will enable other institutional repositories to establish similar connections with Zotero.

The IR integration will rely on two key new Zotero technologies to be developed under this grant: a push-based API and a standalone service that connects Zotero to other web applications. Working together, these two new features will enable a range of actions in third-party web services triggered by changes in Zotero libraries, much like an IFTTT for Zotero.

The Penn State team will be led by Ellysa Stern Cahoy, an education librarian who has already conducted extensive research into how faculty manage and archive scholarly communication. She will build on her research to assess how this new Zotero functionality helps humanities scholars to refine their research practices.

We’re delighted to announce the immediate availability of Zotero 4.0, which offers loads of new functionality. Many of these features were requested and designed via our support forums and developer list, and we’re excited to put them into the hands of our users! Here are a few highlights:

Automatic Journal Abbreviations
Zotero now comes with built-in journal abbreviations that match publications to their standard shortened forms.

Colored Tags
Zotero 4.0 lets you to assign colors to up to six of your favorite tags to highlight important “to read” articles or other items that you would like to find quickly at a glance.

On-Demand File Syncing
The latest version of Zotero can be configured to download files only on demand to save bandwidth and disk space on devices where you don’t require your full Zotero library synchronized. A new attachment indicator UI lets you know at a glance whether a file has been synced and is available.

Automatic Style Updating
Zotero now performs a daily check for revised citation styles and automatically downloads them as needed.

Detailed Download Display
Our iconic one-click import just got better: Zotero now immediately shows which collection is receiving your newly saved items and indicates whether any attachments have been grabbed.

Beyond these highlights, Zotero 4.0 includes many under-the-hood improvements that set the stage for major advancements in the very near future. As always, if you have any questions about Zotero, a dedicated group of users and developers are happy to help you in our support forums!

Many thanks to Sebastian Karcher for contributing screenshots and text to this post.

We’ve upgraded our free and lower tier storage plans significantly beginning today:

For those keeping score, that’s tripling the free plan and doubling the $20 subscription. If you’re an existing subscriber, there’s no need to take any action: your account has already been upgraded.

As always, the entire balance of Zotero storage subscriptions is fully available for shared libraries and collaborative groups with any number of members at no extra charge. For complete pricing details, please visit our storage support page.

There is still time to sign up for Zotero Trainer Workshops this November:

• November 8-9, 2012 Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA
• November 15-16, 2012 University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
• November 29-30, 2012 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Atlanta participants hard at work.

The first of this year’s workshops was held at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. Participants came from different backgrounds and arrived with wide range of prior experience with Zotero – from virtual novice to seasoned expert – but all left with wealth of new skills and information.

"The workshop was exceedingly useful because it covered Zotero basics for the novice, but [also] gave librarians and other trainers the inside scoop on the way that Zotero works (…). Getting the hands on practice writing a citation style and a translator also drove home the fact that it is not too daunting a task for non-developers." — Hannah Rogers, Public Services Librarian, Mercer University

Though I’ve used and taught Zotero for several years now, Sebastian’s workshop taught me many new tricks and techniques. It was an intensive look behind the scenes from an expert who really understands Zotero in and out, and helped me reach a deeper understanding of this fantastic software. — Jason Puckett, Communication Librarian, Georgia State University, author of Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers, and Educators

After gaining an in-depth understanding of Zotero’s functionality, participants discussed and shared strategies for supporting and documenting Zotero. The last session of each day was dedicated to going beyond using Zotero towards extending it. Participants learned that one need not be a "coder" to adapt a citation style or even write a simple translator for Zotero – the results of those sessions, a new citation style for the journal Conservation Letters and a translator for the Atlanta Journal Constitution website are now part of Zotero. The agenda of the Atlanta workshop is available online.

The cost for the workshops is $350 per participant. See here for more informations on the workshops or e-mail Sebastian Karcher, who will conduct the workshops, at karcher[at]u.northwestern.edu