Recently the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive $1.2 million dollars to develop new services that will aid scholarly sharing, collaboration, citation, and annotation.

In 2008, users will be able to drag and drop items into the “Zotero Commons” – a dedicated part of the Internet Archive’s servers – through an icon in the left column.

Items donated to the Commons will be stored in subdirectories of the Commons named for the donors. In addition to encouraging donations to the commons (since those donating will receive credit for their contributions), this feature will also enable users to identify others who are working with and/or annotating the same content, fostering new collaboration opportunities. The benefits to the scholarly community of the Common are thus threefold:

1) The availability of permanent, persistent archival, off-site storage for long-term management and use of digital content.

2) The ability to share resources publicly for easy access by other scholars.

3) The simplified discovery of new, related resources and potential collaboration opportunities.

As an added incentive to donate to the Commons, the Internet Archive will provide free OCR for your contributions and send you the transcribed text to help you search your personal library.

In addition, modifications will be made to Zotero to make it easier for researchers to select already archived files and web pages from the Internet Archive’s existing collections rather than saving local copies. This will enable better referencing of “born digital” items and allow for the collaborative annotation of web documents.

Zotero Commons and Zotero 2.0

Zotero 2.0 will allow you to sync your library’s metadata to the Zotero Server.

With Zotero Commons you will be able to contribute public domain images, texts, audio and other files.

In turn, the Internet Archive will send you any text extracted from donated documents.

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We are excited to announce the first winner of the ongoing Zotero T-shirts for Taglines Contest. Congratulations to zpinhead for his contribution, “Zotero: Research, not re-search.” If you refresh the Zotero home page a few times you are bound to see this new tagline appear at the top of the page.

Now is your chance to get into round two of the contest. Post your ideas for new taglines to our forums and you too could win a Zotero T-shirt and all the glory that comes with it.

We are pleased to announce that the 1.0 release of Zotero is now available. Our dedicated developers have refined and streamlined the Zotero experience, and Zotero is now officially out of its beta testing phase. If you were waiting for that seal of approval, you should now download Zotero immediately!

Those upgrading to Zotero 1.0 from earlier betas will notice significant improvements in functionality and stability, and our even more ambitious next phase of major development is already underway as our team focuses on Zotero’s upcoming collaborative features.

We would like to thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and our users who have contributed code, documentation, feature suggestions, and bug reports to our project. Thanks to your support, we are well on our way to establishing a new standard for research software.

The Zotero team would like to dedicate its 1.0 release to Roy Rosenzweig, whose guidance and vision has made all of our work possible.

One of the exciting new features in our most recent release is compatibility with the Flock browser. We previously blogged about Zotero and Netscape, but Flock integration brings a distinct flavor to the Zotero experience.

Watch this brief screencast to see the synergistic way Flock connects your Zotero collection with its media tool-bar and web clipboard to seamlessly add bibliographic content to blogs, forums, and web documents.

We are excited to announce the launch of Zotero’s final release candidate, Zotero 1.0.0rc4. Zotero is now feature frozen as we fine-tune the upcoming final 1.0 release. RC4 introduces several enhancements to the MS Word Plug-in, compatibility with the Flock browser, a much easier way to find your Zotero database, language localizations in Arabic, Catalan, Hebrew (partial), Hungarian, Romanian and Russian, as well as a long list of other refinements, tweaks and changes.

RC4 improves 17 existing translators, refining support for many of the most popular sites we support. This release also adds support for three additional research databases:

The American Society of Civil Engineers Research Library

Early English Books Online

Ecological Society of America’s Online Journals

Stay tuned for documentation of these new features in the next few weeks.