Accolades continue to roll in for the Zotero project. The editors of PC magazine have again chosen Zotero as one of the year’s best free software applications. Last year PC magazine selected Zotero as one of the best tried-and-true free tools for everyday web users.

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.

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.

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.