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

Scanner for Zotero

BibUp

ZotFile

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!

There are tons of ways to get, books, articles, web pages, and any other kind of item into Zotero. So many, in fact, that we thought we needed this to make this short screencast.  It covers six ways to get things into Zotero. You might just be surprised at how many ways there are to get information into your Zotero library.

Getting Stuff Into Zotero from zotero on Vimeo.

The video covers the following six ways to get things into Zotero:

1. Location Bar Icons: When you visit library websites, journal databases, and many other Zotero enabled sites you can click the icons that appear in the location bar to save citation information in your Zotero library.

2. Create New Item from Current Page button: Clicking the Create New Item from Current Page button in the Zotero toolbar creates a web page item and archives a copy of the page for you to return to later.

3. Retrieve Metadata for PDFs: Zotero can also attempt to identify PDFs you have saved to your computer. Just drag them into the middle column, right click on them and select “Retrieve Metadata for PDF”. If Zotero can find the PDF in Google Scholar, it will add its citation information to your Zotero library.

4. Look up Items by Unique Identifier: If have a DOI, ISBN, or PubMed ID Zotero can look up its citation information.

5. Manually Adding Items: Click the green New Item button in the Zotero toolbar and select the appropriate item type to add a blank item to your library. You can fill in the data in the right column.

6. Importing Records from Other Tools: Many users come to Zotero with extensive collections stored in other reference management software. To import entire collections into Zotero, click on the gear icon and select “Import.” Browse to your file, select it, and click open.

Anyone with a feed reader can now follow public Zotero libraries simply by clicking the feed icon at the right-hand side of the browser address bar. Feeds are generated at the library and collection level, and for group libraries as well as individual libraries.

This feature provides a great way for people both inside and outside the Zotero community to keep track of the latest and greatest additions to libraries and collections, and it will work with any browser and feed reader.

We are excited to announce two major releases. This morning the Zotero team launched both Zotero 1.5 and the first release of Zotero’s web application. Watch the screencast below for details on 1.5 and see the list below for a brief list of Zotero’s new features.

Zotero 1.5 Features



• Automatic synchronization of collections across multiple computers. For example, sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at home.


• Free automatic backup of your library data at Zotero.org.


• Automatic synchronization of your attachment files to a server of your choice (e.g. iDisk, Jungle Disk, or university-provided web storage).


• Recover recently deleted items with Zotero’s trash can.


• Rich-text notes
  


• New style manager allowing you to add and delete CSLs and legacy style formats


• Automatic detection of PDF metadata (author, title, etc.)


• Automatic detection and support for proxy servers



New Website Features



• Browse through your library online.


• New user profiles tied to Zotero accounts.


• Preliminary support for following other Zotero users: In the future this will generate a twitter-like feed of users public research activity.


• WYSIWYG CV creator, with the ability to dynamically generate all or part of your CV from Zotero collections.


• Search for friends, colleagues, and other users by institutional affiliation, username, email address, or field of interest.

As the Zotero development community diligently refines Zotero 1.5, we are also starting to break ground on the new Zotero website. To whet your appetite, here is a small taste of what’s to come.

Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview users can now take advantage of preliminary read access to their synced collections from any web browser on any computer, including a version formatted for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. The image to the right is a screenshot of browsing a collection on an iPhone. Just think of the possibilities!

To try this out, you will need to have synced your Zotero 1.5 library to the Zotero server. Then simply visit https://beta.zotero.org and log in to view your library.

Zotero is now compatible with LibraryThing and CiteULike. Users can now capture bibliographic information from both lists of references and individual items in CiteULike and information about any individual book in their LibraryThing collection. As always, compatibility with new sites and tools brings Zotero closer to its goal of supporting seamless online research. In this case, it is particularly exciting to see closer connections between web tools built for managing books and research materials.

Zotero 1.0.3 is now available. In addition to supporting thirteen more sites and resolving an assortment of bugs with word processor integration, 1.0.3 offers some new features for sharing bibliographies on the web.

It is now easier than ever to insert bibliographic information into blog posts, forum discussions, and web pages. Through Zotero’s export preferences (shown below) you can now include HTML markup in drag and drop bibliographies. To include HTML in your drag and drop bibliographies, all you need to do is check the new “Copy as HTML” box on the export pane of your Zotero preferences.

Beyond adding HTML to style your references, this feature will also embed metadata in COinS with many of the most popular item types. This turns your drag and drop bibliographies into smart bibliographies. Anyone who comes across your references on the web will be able to instantly capture them and add them to their Zotero collections.

From the Preferences pane you can also configure site-specific settings to use specific styles and preferences for different domain paths. Site-specific settings allow you to set different preferences for the different sites you edit. For example you can set a preference to use Wikipedia citation templates automatically at Wikipedia.org, or set it to use MLA style and include HTML for bibliographies that you include on your blog. To add a site-specific setting, click the plus sign at the bottom of the Preferences pane. Then enter the Domain/Path that you want the specific settings applied to and choose your style. If you want to include HTML, then simply check the “Copy as HTML” box.

You can see the full changelog for 1.0.3 here.

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.

Here at Zotero headquarters we are always delighted to support other open projects, and today marks another step closer to seamlessly integrating Zotero into the Open Access web. Zotero is now compatible with all seven Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals. Users can now capture metadata and full-text PDFs from all the PLOS journals.

Zotero can now automatically capture images from Flickr. Currently users can capture images, tags, and other metadata from individual image pages and search results pages. In the future, we will enable users to capture photos and their metadata from other kinds of Flickr pages, but the current release enables everything from using Zotero as a web photo album to a rigorous tool for analyzing photography online.

Zotero isn’t just for books and bibliographies, it is also an exciting platform for a wide variety of digital collecting. Take a moment and try it out, capture a few of the two billion Zotero enabled photos at Flickr.com