University of Melbourne

margot

Zotero doesn't seem to work anymore with our Library catalogue. It used to in the past, although with some limitations. Has anybody experienced this or found a way around this problem?
Address is http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/search/

CB

I've noticed the same thing at the University of Queensland, which I think uses the same opac as Melbourne.

The UQ library response to this was: "UQ Library recently upgraded to the latest version of software for the Catalogue. Unfortunately Zotero is no longer working with this version. We hope the problem will be resolved before too long."

I find this a bit passive, indeed feeble, but then like most Australian educational institutions, UQ is lazily deferential to the Microsoft 'ecosystem'; and the library in particular has made its resistance to Open Source apps in general, and Zotero in particular, very clear.

Unfortunately (Aus) universities suffer badly from status anxiety, and the opinion of a mere undergraduate has no weight. Has anyone here found useful means, other than being a prof or helping fund VC/Dean wine budgets, of persuading universities to take Zotero seriously?

Tjowens

Margot: just tried to grab a book from your catalog and it worked. Could you post a link to an item that you could not grab?

margot

Tjowens

Basically anything that comes as a result from a normal search of the catalogue, as in:

http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/search/t?SEARCH=inventing+australia&sortdropdown=-&searchscope=30

http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/search/dreference/dreference/1%2C236%2C644%2CB/exact&FF=dreference+books+anthropology+bibliography&1%2C5%2C/indexsort=-

CB

That's odd: I found the same book via an author (aot. title) search on the unimelb opac, and this time the zotero translator works:

http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/search/awhite,+richard/awhite+richard/1,21,39,B/frameset&FF=awhite+richard+1951&2,,5/indexsort=-

It does look like unimelb is using innopac, and if my UQ (also innopac) is anything to go by, you're always going to get patchy results. A workaround is to look for the same item through different search types; one of them will usually work.

Here are a pair of UQ library searches where, similarly, only the author search results are picked up by the innopac translator:

author search

title search

Tjowens

Good eye CB. I sent a message to one of the devs to take a look at it. See if there is any way we can better support those different views in innopac.

pseudomorph

I too have noticed problems with Melbourne Uni, to the extent that I don't believe I've had a successful scrape of any sources.

Interestingly enough, Zotero seems to like LaTrobe (http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/) which also seems to use innopac as it's cataloguing system for which I have not had any trouble regardless of search type.

I've also just tried CB's searches of the UQ library and both were correctly translated into Zotero.