News Category

For those of you who’ve been craving alternative methods for accessing a Zotero library as well as more news on Zotero Everywhere, we are pleased to announce that the time has finally arrived. A breakdown of new Zotero Everywhere alpha releases follows:

Zotero Standalone: For the Desktop

We are proud to announce the alpha release of Zotero Standalone, a new version of Zotero that runs as its own application on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. In layman’s terms: This is a test version of a desktop client, which means you don’t need to have the Zotero Firefox extension open to view your library.  Very little has changed from the Firefox client to Standalone in terms of how you interact with your items; the client looks the same, as if it’s been popped out of the browser window. You still annotate, tag and highlight items in your Standalone client. You create notes, just as you did before. Similarly, citations and bibliographic data associated with your items can be written within Standalone and ported to MS Word or any text editing application, yet you don’t need to separately download the MS Word plugin because it’s already bundled in the Standalone package. The Zotero Standalone download is available here.

Zotero Standalone Alpha : The Zotero Standalone Alpha application looks the same as the Firefox version and shares most of its functionalities. Here, we filtered our Scaffolds subcollection to only show items tagged with the author name “Wagoner Johnson.”

Data Sharing
Zotero Standalone shares a data directory with Zotero for Firefox by default, so any items saved via the Firefox extension are saved in Standalone, and vice versa. You’ll see any changes you make in one client reflected in the other client’s library the next time you open it. (Currently, you cannot have both open at once.)

An example of Firefox-Standalone shared data: Any item saved in Zotero for Firefox (v.2.1b)…

…automatically appears in your Standalone library the next time you open it, and vice versa.

No longer just for Firefox
Zotero Standalone Alpha works not only with Firefox but also with the Chrome and Safari browsers via browser-specific plugins, now available in alpha versions for download on the same page. Note that these plugins are currently in development and are being debugged, so you won’t see the full range of their functionality immediately.

Notes and Caveats
I know the words “test” and “alpha” appear copiously throughout this post, but that’s because it’s important to remember that Zotero Standalone and the associated browser plugins are under active development and, like all test phase software, there are still kinks being worked out. All Zotero test-phase software must be used responsibly at this stage because, if you’re a current Zotero user, we don’t want anything happening to the data living in your stable Zotero library (v.2.0.9). If you aren’t comfortable running early-stage software or are in the middle of an important project, we strongly recommend that you use the latest stable version of Zotero 2.0 for Firefox, available for download from Zotero’s home page.

If your appetite to test out Standalone is sufficiently whetted and you just can’t turn back now, please continue reading.

1)    Create a new Firefox profile to run Standalone: Zotero Standalone Alpha is currently database-compatible with Zotero 2.1 Beta for Firefox, but not with Zotero 2.0.9 for Firefox. As mentioned before, Zotero for Firefox and Standalone can share a data directory. It is not possible, however, for the stable Firefox version (2.0.9) to interact with a data directory from a later version (in this case Standalone, which operates as 2.1). Therefore, we advise setting up a separate Firefox profile to experiment with Standalone. Here’s a link that explains how to create multiple Firefox profiles.

2)    Standalone runs only on certain platforms and in certain configurations for the time being (eg. only Zotero 2.1 Beta for Firefox can be synced with Standalone, Standalone only runs on Mac OS X 10.6 and higher, and so on.) See the Zotero Standalone page for more info.

3)     Certain functionality is not present yet in alpha versions. Some buttons that you see in Firefox (eg., “Save item from Current Page”) are not present in Standalone at the time of this writing. Similarly, the Safari connector may not be able to sense some sites with Zotero translators.  These are issues and functionality being hashed out by developers, and we will keep you updated as things progress.

4)    Keep up with Zotero documentation, Standalone changelog, Twitter, and the forums. When you’re working with software under active development, it’s a good idea to keep up with bug reports, questions other community members are asking, what developers are saying, and so on. Also, posting to the forums is a great way to be a part of the development discourse.

Thank you for all the feedback you have already provided regarding this new release. It’s community involvement and contributions that help make Zotero great. We look forward to bringing you more Zotero Everywhere news very soon.

Greetings, Zotero user community!  My name is Debbie Maron, and I’m the new Community Lead. My job is to serve as the principal point of contact for Zotero outreach, including technical support, advocacy, and strategic partnerships.

I’ll tell you a bit about me before diving into what I hope to accomplish here at Zotero. I graduated from Rutgers with an English degree in 2006 and immediately launched into “what the heck do I do now?” mode. Thinking it may be a good idea to beef up my web skills, I earned a Masters degree within an emerging, interdisciplinary field called Digital Culture and Technology (a sister field of Digital Humanities) from King’s College London. I then attended the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois and most recently worked at the Dumbarton Oaks archive in Washington, DC. In terms of hobbies, I enjoy listening to music, watching foreign films, and photography. Other miscellaneous and relatively nerdier pastimes include researching royal family trees and rattling off facts about Amish life.

I am delighted and honored to be joining the Zotero team. I rely heavily on Zotero for my own research, but am also interested in how other folks (specifically you guys) use the Internet and learn web-based tools; that is, my focus is to enhance the Zotero user experience. Even though Zotero already does a lot, the possibilities are endless in terms of what it could do for people in every field. I have my own ideas about where Zotero can go, but the best suggestions come from you, the users. From data mining plug-ins or touch-ups to the interface to video tutorials, please don’t hesitate to let me know what you’d like to see!

Thank you for reading. I’m excited to work with you in continuing to make Zotero an awesome, collaborative, research-enhancing tool.

About ten seconds after the initial excitement died down, questions regarding Zotero Everywhere‘s release date started rolling in. While we’re not quite ready to provide a firm timetable, we’re happy to report that within days of our announcement our skilled team already had alpha code for standalone Zotero in hand and accessible via our fully open code repository. This software currently requires users to jump through a few tricky hoops to build and install, but within the next few weeks we’ll package an alpha release that’s more easily accessible to bleeding edge testers and developers.

In the meantime, I’d like to offer a peek at what we have so far. All core functionality, including server sync and integration with Microsoft Word, is already in place. And the most exciting part of standalone Zotero, integration with other browsers, is well underway. Here are a few screenshots of the code in action just a few moments ago. I’ve added a couple of red circles to draw attention to the new import icons in Chrome and Safari, but otherwise this is exactly what the software looks like now.

Integration with Google Chrome. Note the Zotero folder icon, just like in Firefox! Search results work beautifully.

Integration with Apple Safari. We’ve customized Zotero to take advantage of Safari’s distinctive look and feel, and here we’re grabbing a newspaper article.

Standalone Zotero showing the above items after one-click import. I actually had Chrome and Safari open and firing items at Zotero simultaneously.

Along with standalone Zotero, work is progressing rapidly with Zotero Everywhere’s expanded API, as well. Stay tuned for more news on that front soon!

We’re delighted to announce Zotero Everywhere, a major new initiative generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Zotero Everywhere is aimed at dramatically increasing the accessibility of Zotero to the widest possible range of users today and in the future. Zotero Everywhere will have two main components: a standalone desktop version of Zotero with full integration into a variety of web browsers and a radically expanded application programming interface (API) to provide web and mobile access to Zotero libraries.

Zotero is the only research software that provides full and seamless access to a comprehensive range of open and gated resources. With a single click, Zotero users have long been able to add a complete journal article, book, or other resource to their personal libraries, including bibliographic metadata and attached files like PDFs. Until now, this powerful functionality has been tied exclusively to the Firefox browser, which not all researchers can or want to use. Today we are announcing support for Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Internet Explorer, which account for 98% of the web’s usage share. Plugins for these browsers will soon allow users to add anything they find on the web to their Zotero libraries with a single click, regardless of the their browser preferences. Rather than use the Zotero pane in Firefox, users will have the new option of accessing their libraries via a standalone desktop version of Zotero, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Zotero’s web API offers any application developer the ability to access individual and group libraries via a simple, human-readable programming interface. Until now, this API has been “read-only” — users could view their libraries but they could not change them via the web or via the API. Today we’re announcing the opening of Zotero’s write API to the public over the coming months. Because Zotero “eats its own dog food” — we already use the very same programming interface to serve pages at zotero.org — application developers can be confident that the public API will ultimately provide all the same functionality used internally at the Zotero project. With full read/write access to bibliographic data, attached files like PDFs, and the citation formatting engine, developers will be able to integrate a full range of Zotero features into their own web, mobile, and desktop applications, and users will be able to take advantage of this functionality at zotero.org.

Zotero Everywhere responds to the constantly changing needs of Zotero’s enormous research community. Downloaded millions of times since 2006 and used by hundreds of thousands of researchers daily, Zotero has grown to the world’s largest and most diverse online research community, with nearly 50 million library items presently synced to zotero.org. In addition to sharing their own individual libraries, Zotero users have formed over 25,000 collaborative research groups to pool references, share files, and coauthor manuscripts. By providing new ways of accessing and integrating this vast array of data, Zotero Everywhere will ensure that Zotero continues to be the catalyst for the next generation of research and scholarship.