This week marks a significant transition for Zotero as we introduce Freemium Edition. It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in Zotero, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality research management software to scholars around the world and on any platform.

If you are a “home delivery” Zotero subscriber, you will continue to have full access to your references on your computer, and they will continue to arrive on your doorstep, as 3×5 cards, at your regularly scheduled delivery intervals: Hourly, Tuesdays, Solar Eclipses, or Arbor Day Only. If you are not a home delivery subscriber, you will have free access to up to twenty references. If you exceed that limit, you will be asked to become a Freemium subscriber. If your birthday falls in September or you are left-handed, you will be asked to pay twice.

Zotero is offering three Freemium Edition packages that allow you to choose from a variety of devices:

• $15 per month ($180 per year) will grant you access to zotero.org from up to five mobile devices, though the devices must only be used while physically in motion.
• $20 per month ($240 per year) will give you access to three mobile or stationary devices, and you’ll be able to use them while seated comfortably and on Thursdays.
• $35 per month ($420 per year) will let you access zotero.org from anywhere, including even the ratty old PC in your parents’ basement.

Non-subscribers will still be able to access up to twenty of their references each month. “We think with careful planning and succinct argumentation, cheapskate scholars will still be able to prepare a short journal article once or twice per year,” assured lead developer Dan Stillman.

Zotero breaks new ground with its innovative lunar billing cycle, which will charge users every 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes. Zotero Outreach Coordinator Debbie Maron explained, “Plato said that the forms resonate with the divine movement of the heavens, so scholarship should be billed similarly.”

The new pricing model is intended to address longstanding concerns about Zotero’s commercial viability. “We found that no matter how much we promoted Zotero’s award-winning features and dynamic developer community, potential adopters couldn’t wrap their heads around free software,” remarked Zotero co-director Dan Cohen. As he used a hundred dollar bill to light a cigar, Cohen added, “Time to get paid!”

In order to cement its advantage in providing the latest and best cutting-edge technology, Zotero will now also lead the pack in the most important category: cost. “How do I judge the quality of my Bentley or this caviar and foie gras hoagie?” asked co-director Sean Takats, peering through his monocle. “By the outrageous price, of course, and now we can finally do the same for Zotero.”

Faolan Cheslack-Postava could not be reached for comment, probably because he’s on his yacht.

We are excited to announce the release of Zotero 2.1, now available for download at zotero.org. This version offers several cool new features, including:

• New citation formatting engine: Zotero 2.1 supports Citation Style Language 1.0 styles, dramatically extending Zotero’s capability to generate bibliographic output
• New user-configurable Locate button supports Pubget, CrossRef, and OpenURL lookups; other search engines can be easily added
• Improved Word and OpenOffice plugins for Windows, OS X, and Linux
• Zotero can now run as a browser tab
• Compatibility with Firefox 4.0

For a complete list of other added features and bug fixes, please see our changelog.

Adhering to detailed bibliographic rules is a hefty task that Zotero makes easy by automating the creation of bibliographies and citations. What if, however, you are a multilingual scholar, working with materials in more than one language? There are special challenges here that will soon be met, thanks to the efforts of Zotero community developers who are nearing the final testing phase for Multilingual Zotero, a groundbreaking tool that can automatically capture, organize and correctly format items enriched with translated and transliterated multilingual data.

How It Works
Multilingual Zotero currently exists as an experimental variant of Zotero 2.1 and works in the Firefox browser. It retains Zotero’s original look and feel, but offers additional multilingual functionality, allowing you to translate, transliterate, and sort your citation data within the Zotero application. There is little difference from mainstream Zotero in the big ways.

The following screencast by Frank Bennett shows the tool in action, from data retrieval to building a bibliography.

Data Capture
A defining feature of Multilingual Zotero is that it can automatically capture citation data in more than one language, if the Web resources in question have multilingual metadata attached to them.

Data in two+ languages: By clicking the translator icon in your URL, Multilingual Zotero can automatically pull multilingual data associated with a citation. In this example from the CiNii Web site, Zotero retrieves English and Japanese titles, as well as English name translations from an article.

If all the multilingual data you need for a citation record is not automatically imported, you can always add more languages and data manually into Zotero. Fields such as Title, Author, and Publication are not only editable but can have multiple language metadata attached to a single element.

Manual Addition of Multiple Languages

Adding data manually: This screenshot from Avram Lyon shows an item for a Tatar book, originally published when that language used an Arabic script. The item is supplemented with a transliteration into the modern Tatar Cyrillic, as well as translations into Russian and English. Lyon states: “In history and philology, this stuff is par for the course, and there never was a way to do it right. Until now.”

Duplicates Detection
While the main attraction in Multilingual Zotero is its multilingual features, the same client also provides a duplicates detection and management system, that can be used to identify and merge duplicate items in your library. When items are added to Zotero they are flagged with a yellow highlight that can be removed only by visiting a special “Duplicates view” interface. The end result is the preservation of both document links and collection items.

Source: Stephan De Spiegeleire, Tim Sweijs & Tong Zhao, Contours of Conflict in the 21st Century – A Cross-Language Analysis of Arabic, Chinese, English and Russian Perspectives on the Future Nature of Conflict (The Hague: The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, 2011). Data view provided with permission.

A Community Creation
What makes Multilingual Zotero extraordinary (in addition to all the other stuff) is that it was created by community members. Frank Bennett, Associate Professor at Nagoya University in Japan, prepared the first version of Multilingual Zotero as a contest submission last Fall. Bennett was then joined by Avram Lyon and a range of other contributors from around the globe who signaled their interest in and support for the project through various channels.

Multilingual Zotero is a testament to how powerful the combination of community contributions and open-source development can be. As Avram Lyon says, this extension was created “by scholars, for scholars.”

Frank Bennett’s Multilingual Zotero page (a work in progress) is currently the best source information on the release. In the spirit of “crowdsourcing”, apart from documenting the features of the release, it offers ideas about how scholars can band together and contribute to the curation of multilingual metadata.

Notes

1) Multilingual Zotero is currently undergoing major changes and so is aimed at developers only at this time. If you are not comfortable with test-phase software, we recommend that you stick with the current stable Zotero download (v. 2.0.9) for Firefox. Multilingual functionality developed for Multilingual Zotero will be bundled into an official version of the Zotero download in the future.

2) If you are a developer, Frank Bennett’s Multilingual Zotero site is currently the best place for directions on how to safely use Multilingual Zotero by installing it in a separate Firefox profile. The site also contains links to the download and MS Word plugin. (Note that screenshots in the site documentation will not match up with what you see in your user interface for the current version for download, as the client code is being continually updated to stay abreast of the Zotero development trunk.)

3) If you develop a Web site that uses the Resource Description Framework (RDF) or another metadata or cataloguing format for storing multilingual data, please add your name and institution to this form. Knowing the kind of sites that are out there, particularly ones that use RDF, will be useful for the multilingual developers.

4) If you want more information on how to make your web site Multilingual Zotero-ready, please direct questions to the Zotero developer list.

In an effort to organize and formalize outreach, Zotero is compiling a master list of contact information of those individuals who currently teach Zotero (or are interested in evangelizing) at various institutions around the globe.

Also being created is a search and browse tool (with geospatial functionality) so you can find out:

• which institutions are supporting Zotero
• which institutions have workshops and demos, and what is the technical level of these workshops (beginner, intro to CSL/translator workshops, etc)
• lists of libraries vs other institutions using Zotero and their locales
• which places are offering guides and videos, and so on
• who is implementing remote support mechanisms

There will be new Zotero listservs, key Zotero Groups as well as cool new additions to the software cropping up in the coming weeks, and you can keep up to date on any big changes via the Zotero Evangelist group, as well as this blog and the Zotero Twitter. (NOTE: You can monitor Twitter updates by “following” us from your personal Twitter or by using a feed aggregator.  Twitter is a great way to get updates, however you choose to use it.)

IMPROVEMENTS IN OUTREACH

Zotero is also looking at formalizing and improving Zotero outreach, documentation (on the Z site and beyond) and education. This would include determining locations where community evangelists can collate or post links to scripts, videos, libguides etc. so folks don’t need to search around for templates or reinvent the wheel (rather, people can just tweak the wheel per their institution’s requirements) and hopefully this will make the process of teaching Zotero a little bit easier on everyone.

Any personal contact info (email, name etc) will not be publicized or circulated without consent via the form.

Having this list is *crucial* because updates to Zotero docs and outreach cannot happen without community support and input, and these efforts are about improving the Zotero experience for teachers and the many Zotero communities around the world. (We’ll be crafting and sending out a form soon to garner opinions for improvements, and live chat /webinar/screensharing possibilities are being explored too.)

If you are a Zotero teacher for your institution, please complete our online registration form.

ZOTERO EVANGELISTS group

It will be a little while until these grand plans get underway but feedback and opinions regarding changes can be posted in the Zotero Evangelist Googlegroup for the time being. Joining also puts you on a listserv so you can exchange emails with other group members.

If you know of other evangelists who have not yet joined, please forward this request to them as well.

Thanks again, and I’ll be in touch again shortly!

Debbie
Zotero blog: http://www.zotero.org/blog/
Zotero Twitter: http://twitter.com/zotero