See P. Deligne, Multizeta values, Notes d'exposes, IAS Princeton, for the deep mathematical aspects of this.
Also for a general relevance philosophy, see Kontsevich and Zagier, Periods, Mathematics Unlimited(2001). An electronic version is available here.
There are various references, including those of Zudilin, Cartier, Zagier, Terasoma, Oesterle(On polylogarithms), Manin(iterated integrals and ....). Please look into mathscinet.
There seem to be many papers by Dorian Goldfeld and collaborators, too.
