We are excited to announce a new partnership with Emory University Libraries. This relationship promises to further strengthen Zotero’s emerging role as a major platform for research management and innovation.

Rick Luce, Emory University’s Vice Provost and Director of Libraries briefly described the partnership: “Partnering on the development of open source software with CHNM, an established center of excellence in the digital humanities, allows the Emory Libraries to create value for the research community while sharing the risks in developing innovative software.”

Emory’s Zotero team will take advantage of local research environments and library expertise at Emory to contribute to Zotero’s growth.  You can read the full press release here.

In an effort to better equip university librarians and IT staff to implement, train, and support Zotero, we will be offering two-day workshops at locations across the US. Through these workshops, participants will acquire a solid understanding of Zotero’s capabilities and how those capabilities can best meet their users’ needs.

The pilot workshop will be held February 19-20, 2009 at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, just outside Washington DC. The cost to attend the workshop is $350 and, due to the hands-on nature of these workshops, enrollment is limited. The Zotero team will be accepting applications through December 19, 2008 and applications will be considered on the following criteria:

1. Your current or future role in representing Zotero on your campus

2. Your institution’s plans for, or interest in, adopting Zotero

3. Maximum representation of different campuses: we will most likely only accept one or two individuals from any single institution and are seeking representation from a range of schools.

Application details and forms are located here, and applicants will receive confirmation of their acceptance by January 9, 2009.

Applicants not accepted to the pilot workshop will be welcome to apply to the next one, planned for early summer 2009 at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia (workshops in 2010 are planned for the Midwest and West Coast). More information regarding this and later 2009 workshops will be released as available.

We are excited to announce the release of Sync Preview 3, the final preview release of Zotero 1.5 before the initial public beta.

Along with a host of bug fixes, optimizations, and general improvements to Zotero’s syncing features, Sync Preview 3 includes new capabilities for rich-text editing of notes. Users can now take advantage of a wide range of rich text and HTML markup inside their notes. This feature comes through integrating the open-source WYSIWYG XHTML editor TinyMCE into Zotero.

Users can now italicize, highlight, change colors, and superscript or subscript their text, as well as use semantic features such as block quotes to better separate their own writing from quotes and ordered lists to create nested outlines. Users can also edit the raw HTML of notes for full control over the markup.

George Mason University has just released an official statement about the Thomson Reuters lawsuit. The press release is copied below.

The Thomson Reuters Corporation has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over Zotero, a project based at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). A free and open-source software initiative, Zotero aims to create the world’s best research tool and has already been adopted by hundreds of thousands of users at countless colleges and research universities. CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview to its users and the open source community.

As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote. As academics themselves, the creators of the Zotero project strive to serve the scholarly community and to respond to its needs in an age of digital research. In line with that simple goal, they maintain that anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction. CHNM concurs with the journal Nature, which recently editorialized about this matter: “The virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating.”

CHNM remains committed to the openness it has promoted since its founding at Mason in 1994 and to the freedoms of users of its websites and software. Its ambitious development cycle and plans for Zotero’s future remain unchanged. CHNM will continue to develop and implement new research technologies in the pursuit of better ways to create and share scholarship. CHNM greatly appreciates the many supportive comments it has received from scholars, librarians, and administrators around the globe.

As the Zotero development community diligently refines Zotero 1.5, we are also starting to break ground on the new Zotero website. To whet your appetite, here is a small taste of what’s to come.

Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview users can now take advantage of preliminary read access to their synced collections from any web browser on any computer, including a version formatted for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. The image to the right is a screenshot of browsing a collection on an iPhone. Just think of the possibilities!

To try this out, you will need to have synced your Zotero 1.5 library to the Zotero server. Then simply visit https://beta.zotero.org and log in to view your library.