There's been murmurs for awhile that Zotero was going to develop a standalone software program version. For those of you who've been watching too much t.v. or simply not into library stuff, Zotero is a fantastic integrated reference manager. What does that mean? Up until now it meant that if you did a research database search (think using a university library's research databases), saved the interesting articles in the database (typically easy to do), then you could save all of that reference information to Zotero—as long as your web browser was Firefox and you had the Zotero plug-in installed.
While Zotero works very nicely, and is free, there's a few key limitations. First, it only works with Firefox. Today an alpha version of Safari and Chrome extensions were provided! These are early versions, and I found my Safari extension didn't work in a lot of real world situations, but . . . it's great to see that somewhere this year we will have versions of Zotero that work smoothly in Safari and Chrome browsers.
A second limitation, and a huge demand, was to have a standalone application. Today they also released an alpha version of this for both Mac and Windows. My guess is that I'll end up using Safari to identify and send new research references to Zotero with one button push. And I'll probably use the standalone version for all the organizing into groups, creating bibliographies, exporting work.
Check out the new alpha download (if you are brave and comfortable with computers) plus read all about this new step forward at:
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