No, I'm not writing about RefWorks, which CUNY recently made available across the campuses, but rather Zotero. Launched today, Zotero offers a browser-based citation management system. It also gives you space in the browser to keep notes about items you've added to your library of citations. You can even use Zotero to store copies of web pages.

This project is the creation of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. You may recall that the center worked with CUNY's American Social History Project to help create the Who Built America? CD-ROMs in the 1990s.

I haven't yet tried to install Zotero yet and give it a spin, and I probably won't for a while. The software requires that you have Firefox 2, which is itself only in beta right now. At least one librarian has tried it out and blogged about it: Peter Binkley at Qaedam Cuiusdam.

Like any good web 2.0 tool, the folks behind Zotero have set up a blog so you can stay informed of new developments. If you want to learn more about the history of Zotero, the technology working behind the scenes, the origin of Zotero's name, and more, check out this podcast that Dan Chudnov did recently where he interviewed Zotero's creators.

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