Posted March 4th, 2008 by Trevor
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.
Posted February 21st, 2008 by Trevor
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.
Posted February 19th, 2008 by Trevor
The Zotero community has translated Zotero into 26 different languages. People around the world are using Zotero in everything from Arabic to Vietnamese. In an effort to better support Zotero’s growing non-English user communities, we are asking bilingual community members to translate our quick start guide into additional languages. Zotero already boasts three quick start guide translations, Rintze Zelle’s Dutch translation, Harald Kliems’s German translation and Anaclet Pons’s Spanish translation, each of which is an excellent model for translating our documentation. If you would like to put your language skills to work for the Zotero project and contribute a translation of the quick start guide, please contact campus-reps(at)zotero.org. You might even get a t-shirt and some stickers.
Posted February 7th, 2008 by Trevor
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.
