bookmarks import doesn't handle dates properly

anarcat

The following record in my `bookmarks.html` file:

Perf Wiki

... gets imported as: http://i.imgur.com/QBhV81Y.png

The "date_added" field should be `1382145440`, that is october 18th 2013... The good thing is that the exported data (e.g. in bibtex) is correct:

@misc{_perf_????,
        title = {Perf Wiki},
        url = {http://perf.wiki.kernel.org},
        urldate = {2013-10-19},
        keywords = {diagnostics, performance, sysadmin, tools}
}

... but then whenever I will access that file, that date will change - I would rather have the date_added field be set properly as well.

Apparently, this is not a bug: https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/424 - yet I don't understand why this can't be improved.

dstillman

The Date Added and Date Modified fields refer to the Zotero item, not the underlying bibliographic reference. Those fields exist for all items and are simply the times the item in Zotero was added or modified. They have nothing to do with the actual data you import.

The "date_added" field gets added to Accessed — the bibliographic reference's access date — as it should, and exported properly from there.

but then whenever I will access that file, that date will change

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The Accessed field in a Zotero item isn't changed automatically.

anarcat

It still seems to me the added date should be modified accordingly, otherwise it is not a smooth transition. "accessed" is not the same as "added" in my book...

adamsmith

what do you want the added date for? It's designed to show when an item was added to your Zotero library. You can't use it in a citation style.

anarcat

I want the 'date added' field to reflect when I first added that record, and since this is an import, I expected that to reflect when it was added to the original source, not zotero.

I added a small python script that will copy over the date to fix that for me.