Over the past few weeks, a spate of paid and free Android and iPhone apps have appeared that extend and enrich the Zotero research ecosystem. Here are four of the most exciting mobile applications now available:

Zandy

Zandy is well on its way to being the first full-featured mobile Zotero application for Android devices. Users can currently edit and view their Zotero libraries, add new items, and work offline. Future releases promise even more functionality.

Scanner for Zotero

Scanner for Zotero lets you add books to your Zotero library from anywhere, with no need to have Zotero installed anywhere. Simply scan a book’s ISBN barcode with your Android phone, and the software will add the book to your Zotero library directly on our servers.

BibUp

BibUp allows iPhone users to add books to their Zotero libraries much like Scanner for Zotero, and it also provides the additional functionality of photographing specific pages to be collected, on which BibUp will even perform OCR.

ZotFile

ZotFile Reader eases the transfer of Zotero-based PDFs to and from mobile readers like Android devices and the iPad. It builds on the success of the original ZotFile extension, which significantly enhances Zotero’s built-in PDF management by automating the attachment of PDFs to Zotero items, and the renaming of those files according to user-configurable rules. The latest beta version of ZotFile combines all of this functionality into a single extension.

As amazing as these projects are, the traffic on the Zotero developers mailing list suggests that we can expect even more exciting developments in the near future!

Eleven months ago, we announced Zotero Everywhere, a grant-funded initiative to extend Zotero far beyond the Firefox browser. Last week we took the wraps of our new site design, which allows users to edit and reorganize their libraries via the web. Today we’re thrilled to announce the immediate availability of beta versions of Zotero Everywhere software. Because the idea of Zotero Everywhere was to be, well, everywhere, there are several different components to this beta release that can be used independently or in conjunction with each other.

Zotero 3.0b1 for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Since 2006, Zotero has run as a pane (or more recently, as a tab) within the Firefox browser. Many users, however, have expressed their preference to run Zotero as an entire separate desktop application. As of today, researchers can now download and install a version of Zotero that runs fully independently of the Firefox browser. The user interface remains familiar enough so that long-time Zotero users won’t get lost, but this application also includes important new functionality, including automatic duplicate detection and resolution; an entirely new and streamlined integration with Microsoft Word and OpenOffice; and a refined quick search interface.

Zotero 3.0b1 for Firefox. The “classic” version of Zotero isn’t going away, and so we’re also bringing the same new functionality to the version of Zotero that runs inside the Firefox—except, of course, the ability to run outside the browser!

Zotero Connector Betas. Today Zotero’s ability to grab bibliographic items with a single click now comes to browsers other than Firefox. If Zotero 3.0 is installed, Chrome and Safari users can now add items to their Zotero libraries with a single click. If Zotero isn’t installed on the user’s machine, the Zotero Connector can even add items directly to the user’s Zotero library hosted on our server (Please note that this entirely new direct-to-server functionality requires some rewriting of Zotero translators, a process currently underway. Amazon, arXiv, JSTOR, and the New York Times are among those already upgraded).

Remember that Zotero 3.0b1 and the Connectors are beta software! If you’re in the middle of a project or not comfortable running beta software, use Zotero 2.1, the latest stable release of Zotero, instead.

Things may have seemed quiet here on the Zotero front over the past few months, but the development timeline tells a very different story: we recently recorded our 10,000th commit to the code repository, and the pace of development associated with the Zotero Everywhere initiative has only accelerated since then. Over the next two weeks, we’re unveiling the initial fruits of this labor, including:

An entirely redesigned website including full read and write functionality. Based on our own public API, this site brings full interactivity with your library to any browser. A few design quirks remain, but we wanted to put all the new functionality into your hands now while we continue to iron out these issues in the background.

A beta release of the standalone version of Zotero. This new version of Zotero for Mac, Windows, and Linux no longer runs in a browser pane and does not require Firefox.

New browser connector betas. Zotero’s ability to grab bibliographic items with a single click now comes to browsers other than Firefox. The initial beta includes connectors for Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. If Zotero isn’t installed on the user’s machine, the connectors can add items directly to the user’s Zotero library hosted on our servers.

New word processor integration. A slick and streamlined new interface for adding and editing citations will be available in Word and OpenOffice.

Much of this software will still remain in beta for a few more weeks, but we’re far beyond the initial alpha stage and well on our way to a production release. We hope you’ll agree it has been worth the wait!

If you’ve ever used Zotero to create a citation, you’ve benefited from the talents of the indefatigable Frank Bennett, law professor at Nagoya University in Japan. Below is our spotlight interview with Frank, lead developer of the citation engine that powers Zotero’s citation and bibliography functionality.

Name and Occupation:
Frank Bennett, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Nagoya University.

How long have you been using Zotero?
Since December of 2008, so about two and a half years.

What got you interested in developing for Zotero?
Zotero was among the tools I reviewed during a trawl for software to recommend to postgraduate candidates, and it was immediately clear that this was one to run with. The system is a nearly perfect fit for our needs.

Many of our students hail from countries in East and Central Asia, so open source design and community development were big attractions: there is not much point in training students on proprietary tools to which they may lose access after graduation. The architecture is also a good fit: Internet access from some countries in this region can be rather problematic, and that makes it particularly important to have a self-contained local image of the library on the user’s own PC.

Zotero lacked a number of features needed for legal writing, and Asian language support (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) was not yet there. I have a tendency to tinker on things anyway, but those particular feature sets have been my main excuse for meddling in the project.

What kind of development have you done so far for Zotero?
The main things I’ve done are the CSL processor that Zotero 2.1 uses to format references (citeproc-js), and the multilingual branch of Zotero (MLZ), which several of us hope to see in production one day down the road. Both projects have been great experiences.

Zotero development benefits from an amazing range of expertise among its contributors, and the core team’s insistence on standards-based solutions has a very positive ripple effect across the community. In addition to input from CSL designers Bruce D’Arcus and Rintze Zelle, citeproc-js has been kept in line by numerous commenters, ranging from members of the core team, through Zotero contributors and users, to developers working in entirely separate CSL-related projects. The feedback really has been invaluable.

Early adoption of MLZ by Avram Lyon and Stephan de Spiegeleire’s team at The Hague Center for Strategic Studies moved the development goalposts much faster than would otherwise have been the case. There is plenty left to be done for multilingual, but it is largely thanks to Avram and others that the path forward is clearly in our sights.

Anything cool planned for the future?
I’m looking at producing a legal research and writing guide for Zotero, aimed at law students, to provide consistent guidelines for handling a variety of legal sources. With coordinated development of the main legal styles, it should tie in nicely with some important legal metadata initiatives underway within the free access to law communities of Europe and North America. It’s nice to see things falling into place, and I’m pretty confident that we will be able to offer improved legal referencing support in Zotero in the reasonably near future.

His nickname “adamsmith” may ring a bell to Zotero community developers, political scientists, or anyone who has had citation style questions on the forums. Zotero interviews Sebastian Karcher and in doing so learns his motivation for authoring citation styles, translators, and why he chose the name of a famous Capitalist as the pseudonym for his open source work.

Name and Occupation:
Sebastian Karcher
Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, Northwestern University

How long have you been using Zotero?
Since late 2007 – I switched to Linux then and was looking for a new reference management system. I had used Biblioscape before, but I’ve never looked back.

What got you interested in developing for Zotero?
I really wasn’t initially – I’m not much of a programmer, to be honest. I first just wanted to learn to make simple changes to Zotero citation styles. I then got more involved in style development – which is really pretty basic and doesn’t require much coding experience. What kept me interested was, first, the possibility of learning new things – on the way I picked up on some shell scripting, using version control systems (like SVN and git), regular expressions, XPath, now some JavaScript. I would have never gotten myself to learn any of this without a specific purpose.

The other thing that motivates me is more political. I think it’s important to do our best to keep our tools and data free and open. To me Zotero is part of such an effort.

What development activities have you done so far for Zotero?
A lot of my work has been in style development – I’ve probably had some hand in about half of the ~370 independent styles in the Zotero style repository. We’re also thankfully getting more and more styles submitted by users; when a user posts a style for sharing I’ll usually be the one to briefly review it and then commit it to the csl repository. I also try to come by the forum a couple of times a day to see if there are any user questions I can answer.

More recently, I’ve been starting to work a little on Zotero translators, which has become much easier since Erik Hetzner wrote a framework that essentially reduces the task of writing a translator to identifying the relevant XPath.

Anything else you’d like to add? Cool things planned for the future?
As a political scientist I wanted to get translators for all important US magazines – a couple of them – like The New Yorker and Washington Monthly are already in the 2.1.8 version of Zotero, a couple of new ones – New Republic, Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, Slate – are in the queue – so that’s mostly done. I’m also interested in getting translators for more of the databases in Latin America, a region I do a lot of my work on.

On another note: People on the Forum often wonder about my username “adamsmith”; Why would the “Father of Capitalism” – Adam Smith – contribute to an open source project? The reason I’m so fond of Adam Smith is that he is so profoundly misunderstood. Smith actually believed that people were motivated not just by self interest, but also by “fellow feeling” – here’s one of my favorite quotes: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” There is even an entire blog dedicated to debunking misconceptions about Smith, of which there are many.