First of all, many thanks to you, the Zotero user community, for helping to shape Zotero into a great tool. More than the recognition from numerous organizations (like PC Magazine’s recent (re-)stamp of approval), it’s the forum posts, developer contributions, and e-mails from you that we prize above all. It’s clear that “you like us, you really like us!”, and we are working hard to make Zotero into a tool that continues to address your needs and desires.

Here at Zotero Central, a lot has been going on. Whether making Zotero more extensible or ensuring compatibility with Firefox 3, we are busy building away. Two major milestones are now within our sights: server-based syncing of Zotero data and group-managed Zotero collections. We’re also working to make it easier for the user community to contribute to Zotero development. You can read more about the releases and plans on our development roadmap.

We’re very excited about the next year and hope you are too. As always, feel free to let us know what you think in the forums.

If you are looking for a way to annotate video clips in Zotero, Vertov might be the plugin for you. Elena Razlogova and Stuart Thiel of Concordia University’s Digital History Lab have opened the public beta of Vertov, a plugin which allows you to annotate and manipulate video files stored in Zotero. To see the plugin in action check out their screencast.

Concordia’s Digital History lab plans to add more features, including export of clips and collaborative annotating, as well as support for more file types and operating systems. They would appreciate feedback from the Zotero community to help refine the project. Feel free to post questions and comments about Vertov for Elena and Stuart in the Plugins category of the Zotero forums. For more information on future development, you can browse tickets, changesets, and sourcecode in the Vertov issue tracker. If you are interested in contributing to this project, please post on the zotero-dev mailing list .

Vertov is a great example of the ways one can extend Zotero through plugins. We would like to congratulate Concordia University’s Digital History Lab for their contribution to the project. It is a great example of one of the ways other institutions can extend Zotero and offer new features to the entire Zotero community.

Accolades continue to roll in for the Zotero project. The editors of PC magazine have again chosen Zotero as one of the year’s best free software applications. Last year PC magazine selected Zotero as one of the best tried-and-true free tools for everyday web users.

Last Friday, Northwestern University’s Library and Academic Technologies group pitted reference managers against each other in CiteFest 2008. Students, faculty and librarians came together to run each piece of software through a battery of challenges to decide which is the quickest, most powerful, and easiest to use. We are proud to report that Zotero emerged victorious, beating out several expensive alternatives. Thanks and congratulations to Sebasian Karcher and Kathleen Murphy, who represented Zotero in the competition.

The results offer further evidence of Zotero’s position as the new standard in reference management. If you haven’t already, consider pushing for your campus to become a Zotero campus. For help joining the seventy-nine institutions recommending Zotero, e-mail campus-reps (at) zotero.org.