"accessed" field info

mwyarbro

Is the "accessed" field supposed to automatically update to the most recent date/time one has clicked on the URL for a record? (As opposed to the "added" field, which would presumably stay the same.) It would be useful for me if that were the case, since that info is required for many law review citations, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Am I doing something wrong or is this functionality simply not available?

Thanks for any help!

Tjowens

In most cases date added and date accessed are effectively the same. If you happen to visit the web page of an article you had previously archived in Zotero it has no way to know that.

The reason Zotero has two separate fields is that Date added is a useful way to sort through your own information, but it is not something you include in a citation. Date accessed is used for web resources that require accession data in citations.

Now, if you are archiving things in Zotero then I would think you would want the data added and accessed to be the same. You have a copy of the page or attachment from that day, so even if you come back two months later you are still accessing that day's copy of the item.

noksagt

I would think that it would be relatively fast to check to see if the present URL is in the Zotero database, so this might be a useful feature request. I don't know how quick checking for diffs against an archived page would be, nor do I have a suggestion on what to do if there ARE differences (ask to store a second copy of the file?).

mwyarbro

The circumstances I'm asking about are when I look up the record in Zotero and click on the attached link, which still takes me to the live page rather than to an archived copy in the Zotero db. And since I'm doing this via Zotero, that would be different than just visiting the web page through the browser. I certainly wouldn't expect Zotero to read my mind under the latter circumstances. :-)

It's precisely because some of the citation formats I use require date-accessed info that I'm asking about this. If I'm checking that all my online sources are in fact at the URLs listed in my citations before sending off a draft, it sure would be helpful to do this through Zotero without having to manually update the date accessed manually for every single record.

Tjowens

I suppose Zotero should at least update your accessed information when you use Zotero to revisit a link. Ticket created. https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/1179

noksagt

If this is taken up, there should be some mechanism to handle the snapshots. I'd rather have an older "last accessed" date in a bibliorgraphy than a date that was more recent, but is associated with changes from the version I was trying to cite. No easy solution to this. Perhaps we can allow citations to be generated by child citations & use the citation info of the parent, but the access date that is associated with the snapshot? I don't know.

dstillman

I guess the real question is what the purpose of the access date is in a bibliography. Is it to show when one originally found a resource and began using it, or simply to indicate when it was last known to be available? I would think the former, but some people probably see it otherwise. At the very least, there should probably be a way (context menu on metadata label/field?) to update the access date to the current time without manually editing it. If automatically updating access times when visiting the URL via the metadata pane is a common desire, I suppose we could pref it.

noksagt's suggestion for citing individual attachments also seems like a good idea.

jshorb

Before publishing, it is required that all URLs be checked, and then the date accessed must become recent. I don't care when the last time it was accessed was, the Journal that I am publishing in wants to have all URLs double-checked just prior to publication, though. It would be great if this were doable in Zotero rather than manually typing in the current date after I copy-paste each URL into a browser. I would recommend a "go-to and update access date" button next to the URL.

bwiernik

You can type “today” on the field to update it to the current date.