Upgrade StorageCustomized Zotero plugin for online text editor?
I'm a librarian at Cornell am working with a group of researchers who want to incorporate some kind of citation management system into their workflow on their online projects, huge online repositories of info on animals. On the public websites they maintain, each entry is essentially a formatted 5 paragraph essay with citations in text and a separate bibliography of all related articles. When a user clicks one of the in-text citations, a separate window pops up with the formatted citation. If the user clicks the references tab, a list of all related articles on the animal shows up in a separate window.
On the researchers' end, editors/authors log into the site and using an embedded javascript text editor make all the editing changes by hand. There’s code that then puts the formatted doc into their database when it’s done. What they'd like, if possible, is a system with an online database of all their references—a master library—that they could automatically draw from when they edit in the text editor and format citations. So far, it sounds exactly like what Zotero does. However, they want to do this online: the editor would login, and then in the text editor would click to insert citations, and the system would format the in-text citations and provide links to the separate pop up windows, which would contain the formatted citation.
Zotero is what immediately came to mind as a possibility, but I’m not sure if you can edit an online document with it. They’d also like to see if this all could be done FROM an online library—ie, from the cloud. Not sure if either of these are possible. I see that Zotero has recently released an addon (http://zotero-odf-scan.github.io/zotero-odf-scan/) that allows users to insert citation markers into any doc that can be saved as an .odt file and then converted using LibraOffice into active Zotero citations. But that might be more complicated than it’s worth (I have no programming experience, but some of the researchers do).
There may be some kind of work that can be done with Zotero that comes close to what they want, or maybe there’s another option altogether. I’m open to and grateful for any ideas.
Thank you,
Jim
On the researchers' end, editors/authors log into the site and using an embedded javascript text editor make all the editing changes by hand. There’s code that then puts the formatted doc into their database when it’s done. What they'd like, if possible, is a system with an online database of all their references—a master library—that they could automatically draw from when they edit in the text editor and format citations. So far, it sounds exactly like what Zotero does. However, they want to do this online: the editor would login, and then in the text editor would click to insert citations, and the system would format the in-text citations and provide links to the separate pop up windows, which would contain the formatted citation.
Zotero is what immediately came to mind as a possibility, but I’m not sure if you can edit an online document with it. They’d also like to see if this all could be done FROM an online library—ie, from the cloud. Not sure if either of these are possible. I see that Zotero has recently released an addon (http://zotero-odf-scan.github.io/zotero-odf-scan/) that allows users to insert citation markers into any doc that can be saved as an .odt file and then converted using LibraOffice into active Zotero citations. But that might be more complicated than it’s worth (I have no programming experience, but some of the researchers do).
There may be some kind of work that can be done with Zotero that comes close to what they want, or maybe there’s another option altogether. I’m open to and grateful for any ideas.
Thank you,
Jim
Nothing of the sort is available at the moment, but I've been turning a similar idea around in my head for some time. I doubt that anything would become available any time soon, unless, of course, there is some sort of incentive.
Edit: by rich formatting, what I'm thinking is that the editor is actually a front-end to raw HTML data, so you could insert HTML tags (perhaps span's) to denote Zotero citations
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/server_api/v2/read_requests
as implemented in a number of plugins:
http://www.zotero.org/support/plugins#website_integration
but since the API doesn't do citations, this would only work for bib entries, not for the citations.