The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University
and the Emory University Libraries are pleased to announce a
cooperative partnership on Zotero (www.zotero.org), the free,
open-source bibliographic manager. A team of librarians, information
technologists and faculty members led by Connie Moon Sehat, Emory
Libraries’ new director of digital scholarship initiatives, will
extend research capabilities of the software in collaboration with
Zotero’s main development team. Sehat is a former co-director of
Zotero and CHNM.

For Dan Cohen, who is associate professor of history at George Mason
University and director of CHNM, a relationship with Emory exemplifies
the powerful opportunities for institutional cooperation offered by
digital media. “The Center for History and New Media and the Zotero
Project are lucky to now have the resources and experience of Emory on
their side,” says Cohen, “and the continued insight and direction of
Connie Sehat. We look forward to what will undoubtedly be a
tremendously productive collaboration.” Cohen oversees Zotero with
Sean Takats, assistant professor of history at George Mason and CHNM’s
acting director of research projects.

This relationship marks a significant step forward for the future of
the Zotero project. “Partnering on the development of open source
software with CHNM, an established center of excellence in the digital
humanities, allows the Emory Libraries to create value for the
research community while sharing the risks in developing innovative
software,” says Rick Luce, Emory University vice provost and director
of libraries.

Already a powerful research tool, Zotero allows users to gather,
organize and analyze sources such as citations, full texts, web pages,
images and other objects. It meshes the functionality of older
reference manager applications with modern software and web
applications, such as del.icio.us and YouTube, to amass large amounts
of data in easy ways.

Over the next two years, Zotero will allow researchers – and their
data – to interact with one another in Web 2.0 communities, help
scholars archive information with the Internet Archive and offer
text-mining capabilities. Zotero also will expand educational
offerings to provide more support for its growing national and
international communities of users, many located in university
settings. Working in conjunction with the Zotero team at CHNM, Emory’s
Zotero team will take advantage of local research environments and
library expertise to contribute to Zotero’s anticipated growth.

Since its introduction in 2006, Zotero has earned significant
accolades for its facilitation of online research. It was named a PC
Magazine’s “Best Free Software” in 2007 and again this year, as well
as “Best Instructional Software” of 2007 as determined by the
Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political
Science Association.