US Library of Congress Translator not working

cmoesli · March 21, 2012

The icon in the url bar for the import of citations seems to be missing. I use FF v11.0 and Zotero v3.0.3.

You might replicate the problem with the following link:
http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=1&ti=1,1&Search_Arg=Market-driven%20strategy%20day&Search_Code=GKEY^*&CNT=100&PID=CLw_AIEChol9p0o35QBR08Zg3kM6&SEQ=20120321034141&SID=2

aurimas · March 21, 2012

Library of Congress relies heavily on sessions (which only last for about 10 minutes). When the session times out, the "Record Options" on the bottom of the page do not have anything in the "Select Download Format" field. Unfortunately, Zotero uses this exact field to download citations, and. thus, is not able to do so.

If you redo your search for that particular item in the LoC catalog and go to the item page in a new session, you should be able to import just fine. This is not ideal, but the alternative for us would be to manually figure out bibliographic data from the page itself, instead of using the well-structured files that LoC normally allows you to download.

pjc1 · March 22, 2012

I have also been having the same problem since the upgrade to FF 11. Having successfully imported many, many citations from the LoC, I now find that the icon in the URL bar is missing. The same is also true for the Princeton Theological Seminary library catalog.

Running Zotero 3.0.3.

adamsmith · March 22, 2012

I can confirm that, but I don't think it's related to FF11, but rather to an (invisible) change in the LOC catalog.

pjc1 · March 22, 2012

OK, but it does seem strange that _both_ the LoC and PTS catalogs have stopped working with Zotero after the FF upgrade.

adamsmith · March 22, 2012

yeah - I'm not so sure about this anymore, it's an odd problem. In either case I've put up a fix that should fix this. I'll let you know once it's been through review.

adamsmith · March 22, 2012

Fix just went through - update your translators from the general tab of the Zotero preferences and try again. I hope that does it, if not let me know.

pjc1 · March 22, 2012

Great! Seems to be working perfectly!

Thanks for the quick (and successful) fix. Much appreciated.

margot · April 30, 2012

I'm having the same problem. I updated the translator and yet nothing happens (see link below). Using FF 11 and Zotero 3.0.3.

http://tinyurl.com/7oe5kez

Thanks!

M.

adamsmith · April 30, 2012

there is something off with your search sessions that has nothing to do with Zotero. Start a new one (you can see that in all of your individual records it says under Type of Material "Entry Not Found" - that's not right.