Multi-user Hosting Options on in-house Server

stoicbadger

I have used Zotero some time personally, but I am looking for a citation service to promote at the college library I work at. I love using Zotero, but there are a lot of things to cover for students to get signed up and using it. Plus, there is the storage issues. I know you can adjust the settings so it doesn't auto save PDFs and so forth, but that's a lot of instructions for students to follow and get set up.

I would like to simplify the problem by hosting our own Zotero server just for our campus. This way, it doesn't matter if the students have the PDFs auto save or not, because it will be stored on the college's server and not to Zotero's Official server. Does anyone know if this is possible and/or allowed?

Thank You!

Adam

adamsmith

if the concern is just to provide storage for PDFs then yes, the university could set up a WebDAV server, which is an open and well documented protocol that works well with Zotero. However, file syncing would need to be switched to WebDAV and the right URL (and username&password) would need to be entered for each individual student - I don't see a way to provide server access without that requirement, though.

Technically speaking, the Zotero server code is also available and it would be theoretically feasible to run a Zotero server locally, but rolling this out is a major undertaking and also requires providing all students with a patched version of the Zotero software, so unless you have some very dedicated IT people I wouldn't recommend this.

stoicbadger

Thank you. I appreciate the information. I had seen the WebDAV articles out there, but it didn't look like it was for multi-user application.

bwiernik

The only feature that WebDAV doesn't support is group library syncing. So, students on your campus store all of their own pdfs using WebDAV, they just wouldn't be able to use the shared libraries features of Groups.