RECOMMENDED: The Slow Formation of Durable Software

Marking the 20th anniversary of Zotero’s October 2006 launch, Dan Cohen (Northeastern University) recounts the reference manager’s early history in “The Slow Formation of Durable Software,” published in his Humane Ingenuity newsletter. Cohen describes the Center for History and New Media (now RRCHNM) at George Mason University in the early 2000s, where historians who coded “as a secondary rather than primary skill” built small tools for collecting history online. Two of those tools, Elena Razlogova’s Scribe, a desktop application for notes and citations, and Cohen’s own Web Scrapbook, a browser-based collecting tool, became the basis for an IMLS grant to build “SmartFox: the Scholar’s Browser for Digital Collections.” The project was pitched as a way to capture and organize materials from the growing number of digitized library and museum collections.

The post follows the project through its development on the newly released Firefox, the arrival of developers including Dan Stillman, who still leads Zotero’s development, and a long search for a name, which ended with an Albanian word meaning “to learn well or master.” Cohen contrasts the five years it took to arrive at a working prototype with today’s AI-assisted software development, arguing that the slow, collaborative process is part of why Zotero has lasted. Readers interested in what happened after launch can turn to Sean Takats’s companion post, “Zotero at Twenty.”