Status of Endeca translators?

paoloman · August 1, 2008

Duke University (and other members of the TRLN consortium) recently switched to an Endeca-based library catalog, and Zotero users here have noticed that they are no longer able to add books from the new library catalog as they were able to in the old (Aleph-based) one. I saw a few posts in the forum from about a year ago that indicated work was being done on Endeca translators, but it appears to still not be working, even after doing translator updates.

Has anyone been able to get Zotero to work with Endeca catalogs, or can anyone provide a status update on when this might work?

Thanks...

sean · September 3, 2008

It seems that there are several different flavors of Endeca in circulation. We currently support the North Carolina and Florida state library systems, both of which use Endeca, but it looks like Duke is using another version. Unfortunately, I can't see any way to export structured data from the new Duke catalog. Is that indeed the case?

paoloman · September 4, 2008

Thanks for your response Sean. I had tried out the NCSU and Florida ones before I submitted this comment, and at that time they were both not working. Well, NCSU's was working, but I realized that at the item record level the data was being served by their old (Sirsi?) catalog, rather than Endeca (even though Endeca was serving the faceted browse pages). That no longer seems to be the case, and I see the Zotero add icons now when I use NCSU's catalog, but I get translator errors each time I try to use them. The Florida ones seems to be working for me now, but I see other comments in this forum indicating that it hasn't worked in the past few days. FWIW, Zotero appears not to work with the Endeca-based TRLN union catalog either (http://search.trln.org/), but it does appear to be working with UNC-Chapel Hill's. So I agree with your assessment that it's very variable. :-)

I don't know how Endeca catalogs expose their data - I'll check with my colleagues who work on the system and see what I can find out. I'm assuming that if it can be made to work consistently for UNC or NCSU or Florida, we should be able to do whatever they did and make it work for Duke and TRLN too.

Thanks...