As we ring in the new year, we’re tremendously excited about the future of Zotero and the great things in store for 2010: bringing 2.0 out of beta, launching Zotero Commons with the Internet Archive, and introducing even more new features that will continue to make Zotero the most innovative and open platform for researchers. It’s hard to believe that since its modest launch in the fall of 2006, Zotero has been downloaded over four million times and is used worldwide in dozens of languages. Thousands of forum and blog posts and news articles demonstrate that scholars love using an open-source research platform that outclasses commercial alternatives, new and old.

One important part of the future of Zotero is its plan for sustainability. Zotero has been supported by generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and was conceived during work on a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. All of these funders encouraged Zotero–as they do with all grantees–to envision a path from dependency on particular funders to a varied and sustainable support base, and so we have been planning for years for models to underwrite the project (including continuing to pursue grants to create new features and to assist underserved markets).

Some in the Zotero community may have recently seen that the Mellon program which funded Zotero, Research in Information Technology, has recently been folded into the Scholarly Communications program at the foundation. They may have wondered if this news might signal trouble for Zotero. Not at all. The Center for History and New Media, where Zotero is based, continues to enjoy an active and productive relationship with the Mellon Foundation, and indeed is still completing work under a Mellon grant for our collaboration with the Internet Archive.

More important, we have already begun to diversify the sources of support for Zotero, precisely in the way that the Mellon Foundation and others have encouraged us. We will soon write more about one major initiative, the Corporation for Digital Scholarship (CDS), a non-profit organization that sharp-eyed users have noticed provides Zotero’s new cloud storage. CDS will work to sustain Zotero and other open-source projects that serve scholars.

In short, as we have for nearly four years, we will continue in 2010 to pursue our overall ambitious goals for the Zotero Project, including its sustainability. We’re looking forward to the new year, and we thank the Zotero community for how far we’ve already come together.

For the last few months Zotero beta testers have been rapidly filling up their free 100 megabytes of storage space with attached PDFs, images, and video files. We are thrilled to announce that users can now purchase additional storage space for Zotero. Your storage even works for your Zotero groups! In addition to bibliographic information, tags, and notes, you can now share PDFs and other files with students and colleagues.

Effective immediately, you can upgrade your account and purchase additional storage from the storage tab on your settings page. See the Storage FAQ for additional information and pricing  information. For details about enabling your storage see our documentation on syncing files.

To be clear, users will continue to be able to sync an unlimited amount of items, tags, notes and links to our servers, as always. The addition of this new storage space simply allows users the new ability to sync attached files like PDFs, images, and datasets. Zotero will also continue to support WebDAV for the synchronization of personal files, but the new functionality of synchronizing files to group libraries will require the use of Zotero storage.

We are now accepting applications for the third Zotero trainers workshop, to be held February 25-26th at the University of Washington in Seattle. Participants in this workshop will develop a solid understanding of Zotero’s capabilities and how those capabilities can best meet their users’ needs. Beyond acquiring a detailed understanding of the program, participants will learn: best-practices for demo-ing and supporting Zotero at their institution; approaches for developing institution-specific documentation; and steps for migrating user data to and from other research management tools.

“For anyone considering working with Zotero – a game-changer, in my opinion – this workshop is essential. I not only expanded my knowledge of how Zotero works, but now I’m also able to teach our member libraries how, when, and why Zotero is an invaluable research management tool for the communities they serve.”- Jason Kucsma, Emerging Technologies Manager, Metropolitan New York Library Council

Whether or not you can attend the workshop, consider joining the Zotero evangelist Google group, which sustains an ongoing conversation between workshop participants and other Zotero trainers.

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 4th and applications will be considered according to 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 institutions: we will most likely only accept one or two individuals from any single institution.

Application details and forms are located here, and applicants will receive confirmation of their acceptance by December 11th, 2009.

If you have any questions about the workshop please direct them to campus-reps{at}zotero.org

We are delighted to announce that the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Centers Program in the Division of Engineering Education and Centers has hired the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) to provide a customized interface for NSF’s internal use. NSF had already been using Zotero for some time, and based on positive experience with the software, NSF contracted with CHNM to extend Zotero to meet the organization’s needs more fully.

This contract reflects Zotero’s growing role as a critical element in the cyberinfrastructure that sustains scholarly research in general and the sciences in particular. Because NSF has requested a new, custom item type, this project will mark Zotero’s first major step in the direction of user-defined and shareable item types. Other areas of improvement expected ultimately to benefit the broader Zotero community include significant enhancements to saved search functionality.