We are excited to announce the launch of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview, which introduces a powerful slate of new features, including:

• Automatic synchronization of collections among 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 on Zotero’s servers.


• Support for thousands of existing Endnote® export styles. While the CSL styles utilized by Zotero are a much more robust and powerful long-term solution for styling references, we are happy to offer users the ability to use Endnote styles where there are currently no available CSLs.


• A new style manager allowing you to add and delete CSLs and legacy style formats.


• Preliminary support for local sharing of collections through ZeroConf on OS X. Other platforms and full support to come with the final release of Zotero 1.5.

This major milestone for the project requires Firefox 3, so before you try it out be sure to upgrade Firefox as well.

We are excited to announce the release of Zotero 1.0.6. The 1.0.6 launch coincides with the launch of Firefox 3 and marks the first fully supported version of Zotero for Firefox 3.

Zotero 1.0.6 makes it easier than ever to integrate notes from your Zotero library into your writing work flow. You can now drag-and-drop notes into any text field on your system. In addition to this enhancement, the release comes with over a dozen new translators, including translators for the Boston Globe and the National Library of Australia, and enhancements to many existing translators. Zotero 1.0.6 also includes a number of bug fixes, addressing translator errors, report sorting, and word processor communication errors, among other issues. Finally, Zotero is now fully functional in Finnish, Slovak and Thai, bringing the total number of languages Zotero runs in to 34.

Take a look at the changelog for a complete list of changes.

We are excited to announce the release of Zotero 1.0.4. This release offers UI improvements, enhancements to word processor integration, and stronger support for campus proxy systems, along with a number of other features and bug fixes. See the changelog for the full list of changes.

One of the most exciting new features in 1.0.4 is compatibility with Firefox 3. Feel free to give Zotero a test on Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1! Please note, however, that we can only offer full support for the final release of Firefox 3.0, which is expected to be released by the end of June 2008. With this qualification, early adopters of Firefox 3 are encouraged to use Zotero and report any problems they encounter in the forums.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 and earlier have known incompatibilities with Zotero and are not recommended.

Zotero runs quite nicely on the OLPC. If you would like to try it out just set up Firefox 2 and download Zotero just as you normally would.

While the Zotero dev community powers along the development roadmap, other community members have been diligently working to upgrade and expand Zotero’s documentation. If you are a diehard Zoteron, you might browse through the documentation pages; there’s a good chance that you are are missing out on all sorts of features.

For example you can now find documentation on Zotero’s report generating capabilities and using timelines. You might also be interested in portable solutions for Zotero 1.0 as well as techniques for using Zotero 1.0 over a network. Several bilingual community members have updated or created translations of Zotero’s quick start guide. Many thanks to Harald Kliems for updating the German translation, Seangill (Peter ) Bae for contributing a Korean translation, Dániel Takács for contributing a Hungarian translation, and Erwan Le Guerroué for contributing a French translation.

If you have any tips or tricks for using Zotero, think there are some great Zotero features you would like to see elaborated on in Zotero’s documentation, or would like to contribute a translation of the quick start guide: please post your thoughts in the forums.

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.

If you are looking for a Zotero-ready open source web platform for publishing collections online, then today is your lucky day. The Center for History and New Media launched the public beta of Omeka to provide museums, historical societies, libraries and individuals with an easy-to-use platform for publishing collections and creating attractive, standards-based, interoperable online exhibits.

Omeka’s Wordpress-like approach to collection and exhibition publishing makes it easy to rapidly develop and launch high-gloss sites, and its plug-in architecture makes it flexible. In particular, all installs of Omeka come pre-bundled with a COinS plugin, which embeds metadata derived from the Dublin Core fields associated with individual items. This means that all installs of the public beta are Zotero-ready “off the rack” without any tweaking. Beyond offering interoperability between our resources, this software makes it easier than ever for individuals and institutions with limited budgets to share their content online with Zotero users around the world.