The Wilson Center is, right at this moment, running a live webcast of its panel discussion of KGB officer turned journalist Alexander Vassiliev’s newly released notebooks.   Drawn from the KGB archives, these notebooks offer an unprecedented look into Soviet espionage activities in the US from 1930-1950.  Some topics discussed will be Alger Hiss, and I.F. Stone.

The webcast is available here. The agenda is available here (PDF).

English language translations of the notebooks (now held by the Library of Congress) and available as PDFs here.

Primary day in Philadelphia is Tuesday, May 19th.  Do you know who is running? What ballot issues are up for the vote?  If not, Philly good government organization the Committee of Seventy has a web pages devoted to introducing the candidates and ballot issues.  You can find it here.

If you haven’t yet tried Zotero, a free, open source citation management system (CMS) for the Firefox browser that is similar to RefWorks and Endnote, this would be a good time to give it a shot.

The Zotero 2.0 beta already syncs citations and notes remotely and, if you have a webDAV account, can even sync your PDFs.  This weekend’s update to 2.0b3 has now added (partial list):

• Support for group libraries
  • Create and join public and private groups on zotero.org
  • Access group materials from within Zotero, even when you are offline
  • Easily move materials from a group library into your personal library
• Add Item by Identifier
  • Automatically add an item by DOI, ISBN, or PubMed ID
• RTF Citation Scan
  • Author a document in your editor of choice using ”(Smith, 2006)” citation placeholders, save as RTF, and run through Zotero for automatic formatting in style of choice
  • Asks for disambiguation if required
  • Still under development
  • Does not currently work for names with accents
• Import from Clipboard
  • Import any supported format (RIS, BibTeX, etc.) from the clipboard
  • Available via Actions menu option and keyboard shortcut (Cmd-Shift-V/Ctrl-Alt-V)

This can be a very power research tool.  If you have any questions about using it I’d be happy to talk with you about it.