News Category

CHNM’s Dan Cohen will present on Zotero at the University of Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities on Tuesday, March 13 from 12:30-1:45 pm. The talk will be held in the MITH Conference Room in McKeldin Library, room B0135. For directions and other contact information, please visit the MITH homepage.

“Zotero and the Promise of Social Computing in Academia”
by DAN COHEN (Center for History and New Media, George Mason)

The Library of Congress contains over a million dissertations. Each of
these works represents an average of four years of work by a
specialist who has diligently and intelligently scanned, sorted, read,
categorized, assessed, and annotated hundreds or thousands of primary
and secondary sources. The staggering scale of this work–literally
billions of person-hours in dissertation work alone, not to mention
the research that went into the millions of other books those
dissertations share shelf space with–should be matched by the regret
academia should feel since almost all of this research is buried in
filing cabinets or boxes or worse: soon-to-be obsolete digital media
such as a floppy disk or the tacit knowledge of a researcher’s mind.
Often the most we can expect to see from all of this work, aside from
the book or article it informed, is the bibliography that is buried at
the end of the printed text.

But what if we could use digital methods to recapture that enormous
amount of scholarly work, the 90% of research that, like an iceberg,
is hidden beneath the 10% of the final product? The Zotero project
(which I co-direct) has released software that allows users to build,
tag, and annotate their own research collections, with a high level of
integration with online texts and databases; the next phase of the
project will add a server through which users and groups can exchange,
aggregate, and recommend digital texts and resources. If humanities
researchers–professors, students, and others–widely adopted such
digital tools, many parts of the scholarly process could be
recaptured, and, more important, networked together. See
www.zotero.org for more downloads and more information.

Every day, more and more users are downloading Zotero and putting it to use in interesting ways. If you’re still on the fence, you don’t have to take our word for it; see what other people are saying about our next-generation research tool:

“If you spend most of your time doing research on the Web, you need Zotero”
Linux.com

Zotero “is perhaps the best Firefox extension that most users have never heard of, unless you are an academic historian or social scientist, in which case Zotero is becoming quite the rage. It is also percolating into other academic fields, including law, math and science.”
AI3

“Every lawyer wants this”
Bankruptcy Practice Pro

“Researchers, students and librarians everywhere wondering how they ever did without it.”
Dead Reckoning

“It is a revolution in how to approach collecting references”
Organic Researcher

“I have been using Zotero for a number of months and I can safely say it’s one of my most favorite research tools. I don’t do this often, but I highly recommend Zotero.”
Home Office Voice

“it makes the whole citation process so quick and intuitive that I wish it had appeared on the scene years ago!”
Household Opera

“It’s the ultimate in digital note card technology.”
Fundanmentals

“Zotero is already an amazing piece of software that could change the way we do history.”
Digital History Hacks

“Groundbreaking. A glimpse of the 21st century scholarly information landscape.”
Matthew G Kirschenbaum

Read more about What People are Saying About Zotero and check back frequently for new comments.

The editors of PC Magazine have voted Zotero one of their top picks for free software in the February 20, 2007, issue. A roundup of the best “tried-and-true” free applications, the cover story singles out Zotero as a must-have Firefox extension. “Our recommendations are the apps that real people use everyday, at work and at home, for all kinds of tasks . . . They’re tried and tested, the best tools you can get, and they’re all free.”

We have collected a set of resources to make it easier for those who appreciate Zotero to spread the word. In the Promote Zotero section of the site you can find Zotero buttons for your website or blog, flyers, handouts, and our introductory screencast in a variety of formats. A big part of what has made Zotero such a successful tool is our vibrant user community. We recognize that whether by talking, blogging, presenting or otherwise discussing Zotero with other people, our users are our best promoters. We want them to have the resources at their fingertips to make spreading Zotero as easy as possible. If you have any requests for other things you would like to see on the Promote Zotero page, please send your requests to trevor@zotero.org.