The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University is proud to announce the availability of Zotero, a next-generation research tool. Zotero is a free, open source, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you annotate, organize, and share the results of your research. It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when you are viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will—on many major research sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for you in the correct fields.

Probably the best introduction to Zotero is the three-minute demonstration at http://www.zotero.org/documentation/screencasts/intro. But there is a lot more information at our website http://www.zotero.org, where you can also download Zotero, which quickly installs in the Firefox browser. We think that you will be impressed as have thousands of others who have already used Zotero. A recent review in Linux.com calls it “a seriously useful research tool.” Historian William Turkel describes Zotero on his blog as a”an amazing piece of software that could change the way we do history.”

We would love to have your feedback on Zotero. Please join in our active discussion boards or email me directly.

best wishes,
Trevor Owens