Read and Save Web Sites and PDFs with Zotero Everywhere

Zotero started out as a Firefox extension to save and manage web and PDF sources. It was included in part of the special ?campus edition? of Firefox, and is integrated into the new UberStudent build of Ubuntu Linux. Today, Dan Cohen from the Center for History and New Media announced Zotero Everywhere, a multi-pronged effort to bring its research management and social-network capabilities to every major browser and platform ? including mobile devices.
On Firefox, the Zotero extension already allows users to archive and store web documents and PDFs, organize and annotate collections, export citations and bibliographies, and sync and share their work across multiple devices or with multiple users through accounts on a central server. As Zotero Everywhere rolls out, the program will add the following:
A standalone Zotero application for Windows, Mac, and Linux;
An HTML 5 web application which will work on any device, including mobile;
Extension/toolbar support for Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer on all of those platforms (which will in turn sync with user?s Zotero accounts and the standalone Zotero app);
Bookmarklets for any browser (including Opera, et al) to quickly save documents to a user?s Zotero account
An expansion of its API to encourage third-party developers to create standalone client apps for iOS, Android, Blackberry, and other platforms.
Zotero was initially developed for academic researchers working with often-recalcitrant web sources, but after using it for four years (it feels like longer!) in a variety of contexts, I can tell you that it?s a boon to anyone doing any kind of guided searches on the web: students, journalists, librarians, bloggers, curators, etc, or anyone who wants to keep an archives of web pages as they exist or who hates wrangling lots of PDF documents.
Think of it as a virtual file-cabinet, or collection of index cards. But it?s smarter than that. Its social and sharing features, which often aren?t emphasized, are also very strong; it?s thoroughly possible that Zotero could emerge as a kind of backchannel social network for students and academics. (In small doses, it already is.) Zotero?s archival and metadata-extraction capabilities are top-notch ? as good or better than the many commercial PDF-organization applications that followed it.
There are plenty of services that will sync data across your devices, but very few that will actually give that data structure. I?ve been after the developers to graduate Zotero from Firefox-extension status for years; I?m particularly excited about the standalone application and ? especially, as more of us do more of our reading away from our computers ? the future of mobile development with Zotero.
The Zotero extension is downloadable now; the new standalone application for the desktop should be released ?very soon,? with other new features to follow. Everything released by Zotero is free.
Video screenshot tour of Zotero 1.5 via Zotero.org.
See Also:
Zotero Makes Writing Papers a Bit Less Painful
Colleges Dream of Paperless, iPad-centric Education
Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities ?
Viva Cyber Academia, man

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