The University Libraries is providing an institutional storage license for Zotero, a powerful reference management system. This means that that all Zotero users with a linked UNL email address will be automatically upgraded to unlimited personal and group cloud storage.

Initial responses from faculty are positive to the Zotero Institution upgrade.

“Endeavors like this directly support research, graduate student mentoring, and my teaching at UNL,” said Justin Olmanson, associate professor in teaching, learning, and teacher education and chair of the Innovative Learning Technologies Program.

Scout Calvert, chair of Libraries Research Partnerships, is excited that the Libraries can now better support users of this open-source, academy owned tool. Zotero Institution provides all the features offered by the free version plus two significant new features: unlimited storage of bibliographic data, notes, and PDF of research articles and that storage is shareable with all the members of your research team.

“We are thrilled to be able to provide Zotero Institution to UNL faculty and students,” Calvert said. “This robust tool will be of great assistance to our scholars who work in teams making it easy for them to collaborate.”

Zotero integrates with MS Word, LibreOffice, and Google Docs so users can automatically create citations and bibliographies in thousands of styles as they write. Its built-in PDF reader allows you to annotate and highlight your research materials. It also supports evidence synthesis projects, making it easy to store and organize documents during screening stages, and de-duplicate the results.

All current UNL-affiliates who have linked their UNL email address in Zotero will be automatically upgraded, and UNL email address will be recognized for your Zotero account. If any users registered with a different email address, they can add their institutional address to their account when they're logged in.

Calvert says that they plan to celebrate this exciting acquisition by hosting a launch party where members of the UNL community can get help with installation, ask questions and see demos. More details and additional events will be announced soon.

Send any questions to Scout Calvert at scout.calvert@unl.edu, or Erica DeFrain at edefrain2@unl.edu.

Zotero is a project of Digital Scholar, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development of software and services for researchers and cultural heritage institutions. Development, maintenance, support, and infrastructure costs for Zotero services are funded by storage subscriptions from individuals and organizations.