Only three months after the release of Zotero 1.0, we are proud to report that Zotero is rapidly becoming the new standard in reference management and research. Already over sixty different libraries, writing centers, academic departments and other research and teaching institutions have added information about Zotero to their websites. Some institutions, like MIT, have developed their own web tutorials on using Zotero, and others, like Rice University’s Fondren Library, are offering Zotero workshops for students and faculty. If we have missed your institution’s recommendation of Zotero or you would like help developing a workshop or web tutorial for your users, please feel free to contact campus-reps@zotero.org.

We are excited to announce the second winner of our ongoing Zotero T-shirts for Taglines Contest. Congratulations to Eric Wignall for his contribution, “Zotero: the web now has a wrangler.” If you refresh the Zotero home page a few times you are bound to see this new tagline appear at the top of the page.

Now is your chance to get in on our ongoing contest. Post your ideas for new taglines to our forums and you too could win a Zotero T-shirt and all the glory that comes with it.

We are excited to announce the release of Zotero 1.0.2.

One of the most exciting new features in 1.0.2 is improved support for installing custom citation styles, coupled with the creation of a style repository that includes some fifty new styles, or nearly six times the number of available styles in version 1.0.1. Special thanks to Julian Onions for his contribution of nearly all of these new styles. To add a style, visit the styles page and click Install next to the style you are interested in using.

Zotero 1.0.2 also includes several new site translators, including translators for social media sites Flickr and YouTube. Zotero’s default Open URL resolver has also been changed to the OCLC OpenURL Resolver Gateway, which will allow many Zotero users to automatically find items from their collections in their campus library through the Locate button without editing their preferences.

Zotero 1.0.2 requires new versions of the MS Word and OpenOffice integration plugins.

To see all of the changes, new features and bug fixes, take a look at the full changelog.

Recently the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive $1.2 million dollars to develop new services that will aid scholarly sharing, collaboration, citation, and annotation.

In 2008, users will be able to drag and drop items into the “Zotero Commons” – a dedicated part of the Internet Archive’s servers – through an icon in the left column.

Items donated to the Commons will be stored in subdirectories of the Commons named for the donors. In addition to encouraging donations to the commons (since those donating will receive credit for their contributions), this feature will also enable users to identify others who are working with and/or annotating the same content, fostering new collaboration opportunities. The benefits to the scholarly community of the Common are thus threefold:

1) The availability of permanent, persistent archival, off-site storage for long-term management and use of digital content.

2) The ability to share resources publicly for easy access by other scholars.

3) The simplified discovery of new, related resources and potential collaboration opportunities.

As an added incentive to donate to the Commons, the Internet Archive will provide free OCR for your contributions and send you the transcribed text to help you search your personal library.

In addition, modifications will be made to Zotero to make it easier for researchers to select already archived files and web pages from the Internet Archive’s existing collections rather than saving local copies. This will enable better referencing of “born digital” items and allow for the collaborative annotation of web documents.

Zotero Commons and Zotero 2.0

Zotero 2.0 will allow you to sync your library’s metadata to the Zotero Server.

With Zotero Commons you will be able to contribute public domain images, texts, audio and other files.

In turn, the Internet Archive will send you any text extracted from donated documents.

Icons provided by fast icon