Earlier today, the Zotero Project announced concrete plans to release a stand-alone, browser-independent version of their open-source, bibliographic management system. Since its inception, Zotero has been tied to Mozilla Firefox as a support for its underlying architecture. Yet, as the members of the Zotero Project recognize, “not all researchers can or want to use” Firefox. In addition to maintaining Zotero’s compatibility with Firefox, this “major new initiative” for a stand-alone version of Zotero will “soon” allow users of “Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Internet Explorer” to use Zotero with whichever of these browsers they choose. This move will extend Zotero’s availability to approximately 98% of internet users.
In fact, this initiative was actually announced in embryonic form earlier this year, but at the time, no timeline was provided for when end-users might see the fruits of this new move within the Zotero Project. So, for active and potential Zotero users, today’s announcement certainly marks an exciting step in the evolution of a wonderful research tool.
If you have yet to become familiar with Zotero, the video clip below still provides a good (if now somewhat dated) overview:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLi3ZhUQDhs&fs=1&hl=en_US]
Especially for those in the field of Biblical Studies who might be interested in using Zotero, support for the Society of Biblical Literature Handbook of Style does exist, albeit still in a development version.
At long last! This is really good news. I really like Chrome; but their bookmarking sucks and there’s no plugin anything like Zotero.
Of course “RealSoonNow(tm)” is infamous.
Indeed, you’re exactly right about “RealSoonNow(tm),” but when I went to the Zotero website yesterday, I did also see that they are now testing a new 2.1 beta. With the dissertation hanging in the balance, it’s not worth it for me to try upgrading :-), but I wonder whether 2.1 may morph into this stand-alone version or an immediate precursor to it (?).
Is there a blog or feed or url which one can monitor for announcements?
There sure is: http://www.zotero.org/blog/.
In looking at that URL, though, I couldn’t find the feed just now. That URL is: http://www.zotero.org/feed/.
Thanks. The blog url was enough for Google Reader. 😉
Ah, that must be how I got it. 🙂