Zotero, a wonderful free resource for collecting, managing and citing sources, recently announced a major upgrade to version 2.0. “Most important among the new features is the long-anticipated ability to collaborate in groups and group libraries,” according to their post entitled Zotero 2.0 Mothership Lands.
ReadWriteWeb has done a nice job of explaining the new features:
Now, users who are working on collaborative projects can finally share their research in an easy, straightforward manner. If you are working on a research project in a group, for example, you can now easily create a new group and all the members of the group can just add the papers and books they found to this new group, including notes and other remarks they added to the new entry.
Here’s a screenshot of both how groups looks inside of Zotero itself (Firefox plug) as well as how a shared group appears on the web.
So you can see how it looks, here’s a list of my publications which I collected using Zotero groups.
I’ve said it before, but I say it again: I love Zotero. It’s a truly wonderful tool for compiling resources – and now it’s also great for sharing them. As a librarian, I can see myself using the groups page to share bibliographies with faculty and staff members. As a incoming OneL, I can see how I might want to share resources with my classmates using Zotero Groups.
ReadWriteWeb also reports that:
Some of the most exciting changes to Zotero are still ahead. The team also announced that it expects to roll out a recommendation engine in the near future, as well as a storage solution for sharing attached files (PDFs of academic papers, for example), as well as the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds from public groups and libraries.