Sign up now for Zotero Trainer Workshops this summer:

• June 13-14: Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, MA
  
• June 20-21: AWHONN Offices, Washington DC
  
• July 11-12: Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
  
• July 25-26: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
  

The workshops are targeted at librarians and anyone else who supports or wants to support Zotero at their institution or department. While basic familiarity with Zotero is recommended, there are no technical prerequisites for participating.

The cost to attend the workshops is $350. Due to the hands-on nature of the events, enrollment is limited. Sign up while there is still space!

The workshops will be conducted by Sebastian Karcher, one of Zotero’s most active community developers, who has a wealth of experience using, supporting, and developing Zotero. Contact him with any questions about the workshop at karcher [at] u.northwestern.edu

We’re delighted to announce the immediate availability of Zotero 4.0, which offers loads of new functionality. Many of these features were requested and designed via our support forums and developer list, and we’re excited to put them into the hands of our users! Here are a few highlights:

Automatic Journal Abbreviations
Zotero now comes with built-in journal abbreviations that match publications to their standard shortened forms.

Colored Tags
Zotero 4.0 lets you to assign colors to up to six of your favorite tags to highlight important “to read” articles or other items that you would like to find quickly at a glance.

On-Demand File Syncing
The latest version of Zotero can be configured to download files only on demand to save bandwidth and disk space on devices where you don’t require your full Zotero library synchronized. A new attachment indicator UI lets you know at a glance whether a file has been synced and is available.

Automatic Style Updating
Zotero now performs a daily check for revised citation styles and automatically downloads them as needed.

Detailed Download Display
Our iconic one-click import just got better: Zotero now immediately shows which collection is receiving your newly saved items and indicates whether any attachments have been grabbed.

Beyond these highlights, Zotero 4.0 includes many under-the-hood improvements that set the stage for major advancements in the very near future. As always, if you have any questions about Zotero, a dedicated group of users and developers are happy to help you in our support forums!

Many thanks to Sebastian Karcher for contributing screenshots and text to this post.

We’ve upgraded our free and lower tier storage plans significantly beginning today:

Old Storage	New Storage	Cost
100 MB	300 MB	Free
1 GB	2 GB	$20 ($1.67/month)
5 GB	6 GB	$60 ($5/month)

For those keeping score, that’s tripling the free plan and doubling the $20 subscription. If you’re an existing subscriber, there’s no need to take any action: your account has already been upgraded.

As always, the entire balance of Zotero storage subscriptions is fully available for shared libraries and collaborative groups with any number of members at no extra charge. For complete pricing details, please visit our storage support page.

There is still time to sign up for Zotero Trainer Workshops this November:

• November 8-9, 2012 Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA


• November 15-16, 2012 University of Colorado, Boulder, CO


• November 29-30, 2012 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

The first of this year’s workshops was held at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. Participants came from different backgrounds and arrived with wide range of prior experience with Zotero – from virtual novice to seasoned expert – but all left with wealth of new skills and information.

"The workshop was exceedingly useful because it covered Zotero basics for the novice, but [also] gave librarians and other trainers the inside scoop on the way that Zotero works (...). Getting the hands on practice writing a citation style and a translator also drove home the fact that it is not too daunting a task for non-developers."—Hannah Rogers, Public Services Librarian, Mercer University

Though I’ve used and taught Zotero for several years now, Sebastian’s workshop taught me many new tricks and techniques. It was an intensive look behind the scenes from an expert who really understands Zotero in and out, and helped me reach a deeper understanding of this fantastic software.—Jason Puckett, Communication Librarian, Georgia State University, author of Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers, and Educators

After gaining an in-depth understanding of Zotero’s functionality, participants discussed and shared strategies for supporting and documenting Zotero. The last session of each day was dedicated to going beyond using Zotero towards extending it. Participants learned that one need not be a "coder" to adapt a citation style or even write a simple translator for Zotero – the results of those sessions, a new citation style for the journal Conservation Letters and a translator for the Atlanta Journal Constitution website are now part of Zotero. The agenda of the Atlanta workshop is available online.

The cost for the workshops is $350 per participant. See here for more informations on the workshops or e-mail Sebastian Karcher, who will conduct the workshops, at karcher[at]u.northwestern.edu

We’re excited to announce that registration is now open for Zotero Trainer Workshops this fall:

• October 11-12, 2012: Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA
  
• November 1-2, 2012: Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
  
• November 8-9, 2012: Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA (just
  outside of Boston)
  
• November 15-16, 2012: University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
  
• A midwest workshop is planned, date and location TBA
  

The workshops are targeted at librarians and anyone else who supports or wants to support Zotero at their institution or department. While basic familiarity with Zotero is recommended, there are no technical prerequisites for participating.

The cost to attend the workshops is $350. Due to the hands-on nature of the events, enrollment is limited. Sign up while there is still space!

The workshops will be conducted by Sebastian Karcher, one of Zotero’s most active community developers, who has a wealth of experience using, supporting, and developing Zotero. Contact him with any questions about the workshop at karcher [at] u.northwestern.edu

His Zotero username “ajlyon” will sound familiar to anyone who has visited our support forums seeking assistance. Zotero interviews Avram Lyon and learns what’s in store for the creator of Zandy, the first Android app for Zotero.

Name and Occupation

Avram Lyon, Ph.D. student in Slavic Languages and Literatures, UCLA.

How long have you been using Zotero?

I’ve been using Zotero since my first week of grad school, in the fall of 2008. I happened upon it myself when I was looking for something less ridiculous than formatting an annotated bibliography by hand for my graduate proseminar.

What got you interested in developing for Zotero?

I got into the habit of keeping an eye on the support forums, and one day I ran into some problems people were having with one of the site translators—I don’t remember which one it was. I had some idea that the translators were standalone pieces of JavaScript code—so I looked into it, and found out that the fix was just a little one-line change. That was in late 2009 or early 2010. I quickly realized that the vast majority of the translator issues were of that sort, and I started fixing them as they came up. Over time, I learned more about how the translation system works, and started writing new translators from scratch, and eventually contributing to other parts of the project.

What development activities have you done so far for Zotero?

My main work has always been with site translators—- they’re really what makes Zotero so strikingly efficient a research environment, so I’ve done everything from troubleshooting to maintenance to authoring of new translators.

This has been a very interesting area in the last several months—Simon [Kornblith] has managed to make it possible for the existing 300-odd translators to run without Firefox or even Zotero standalone, by making them run inside the Chrome and Safari extensions and save to the Zotero server directly.

The other great improvement has been the introduction of a radically new and much simpler shorthand for writing translators, Erik Hetzner’s translator framework. This is now built in to the translator authoring tool Scaffold, and it makes it easy for casual coders to add support for their favorite sites. I’ve worked a lot on making the framework and Scaffold useful for the average power user—and we’re seeing a lot of new translator contributions these days.

I worked with Frank [Bennett] on testing out the multilingual version of Zotero, which was profiled on this blog several months ago, and I’m still using it for my everyday research. I’m trying hard to make sure that this branch doesn’t fall by the wayside, since I believe it’s an extremely promising development that is vital for the work of almost all humanities scholars, and almost the entire non-Anglophone world.

Anything cool planned for the future?

Since much of my work this year has been in archives and in libraries without electronic catalogs, I’m trying to find ways to make research more efficient and effective in such environments—so I’m actively looking for ways to integrate image capture and management with Zotero’s research organization. I still haven’t found a good workflow for archival and library photography, but the recent developments in libraries that provide access to local Zotero data (Gnotero’s pygnotero library) and the Zotero server API (pyzotero) make me hopeful that I’ll manage to stitch something together in the near future.

I’d like to end by saying that this has been an incredibly exciting time to work with the Zotero project. The work going on at Zotero central, spearheaded by Dan, Simon and Faolan, continues to churn out reliable and increasingly useful software, but more interesting is the growing network of people who are building on this reliable and time-tested core to build new tools. The potential of the server API is only beginning to be realized—and I look forward to working with new projects and new people.

Following a string of critical reports about its software development practices in the United States, Zotero Director Sean Takats recently visited the project’s North American facilities. He traveled to several key sites of Zotero production last week.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Senior Developer Simon Kornblith led Takats on a tour of his laboratory, home of Zotero’s standalone client development. “Although my scientific research dabbles in the creation of unspeakable monstrosities, my work on Zotero is purely humanitarian,” Kornblith asserted with a maniacal laugh. In Brooklyn, New York, Takats verified that Lead Developer Dan Stillman never labors for more than 168 hours per week. “I’m required to answer 3,000 forum posts per shift,” Stillman explained, admitting that the repetitive process can be physically and mentally draining. “Sometimes I think about resting.” The facilities tour concluded in Fairfax, Virginia, where Faolan Cheslack-Postava leads Zotero’s web application development. Referring to notes scribbled on the back of his hand, Cheslack-Postava stated, “It’s a common misconception that every formatted citation or API request involves thousands of tiny fingers operating behind the scenes.” After nervously glancing at Takats, he continued, “No one can substantiate beyond a reasonable doubt that Zotero has employed a single minor since 2006.” In promotional materials the Zotero project claims that citations are generated by gigantic but friendly Japanese robots.

At each site, Takats donned an adorable yellow plastic cap and raincoat to pose for photographers.

Last month Trevor Owens retracted “The Anguish and the Elation of Dan Cohen,” a soapbox rant about poor Zotero working conditions that he had periodically shouted at passersby in the bowels of Washington D.C.’s Union Station. It was nothing but a pack of damn lies, say sources. Former Zotero Director Cohen, who abandoned the project in 2010 vowing to “focus on the synergy between cash and fun,” had no comment.

Today we’re delighted to announce that Zotero 3.0 has officially arrived. Zotero 3.0 marks a major departure from previous versions, most notably with the new ability to run outside the Firefox browser. Available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, this standalone version of Zotero contains all the great functionality of the old Firefox-based Zotero but now enables users to integrate Zotero into browsers other than Firefox like Google Chrome and Apple Safari. To all you Firefox lovers out there, no need to worry! Zotero continues to work within Firefox, and even if you choose to run the standalone version, it will talk to Firefox, too.

The standalone version of Zotero isn’t the only major news: Zotero 3.0 is loaded with other new features. Duplicate detection, heavily requested over the last few years, has finally made an appearance. We hope you’ll agree it has been worth the wait: an elegant interface allows users to find and merge duplicate items. Also arriving with Zotero 3.0 is slick new word processor integration. A streamlined dialog box allows users to add references to documents quickly and efficiently (and it’s pretty, too). References in word processing documents are also now easily shareable with other Zotero users without using groups and even with people using other compatible software.

We’ll highlight this new functionality and more over the next few weeks, but for now we would just like to offer a big thanks to our dedicated user and developer community, whose feedback and contributions were essential in getting this huge release ready for primetime!

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!

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.