Searching a public group library from another website

jpk15

Hi: I'm trying to help a lab group here at Cornell set up a way to search their newly created public Zotero group from their lab's website. This is currently something they do with Refworks and REfshare, but Cornell is cancelling its Refworks subscription and they've moved to Zotero. You can see what their current set up looks like here: http://mulch.mannlib.cornell.edu/. Select "search research database" in the upper right, and you get search results from their REfshare database.

Is there any way, via API or some simple HTML, do do something similar with a Zotero group?

THanks for any suggestions.

Jim

adamsmith

If you want the exact same thing they currently have, you just have to substitute the corresponding values in the search form: You currently have

<form action="http://www.refworks.com/refshare/?" name="rice" mode="get" onsubmit="return validateForm()">
<input name="qs" size="25" maxlength="150" value="Search research database" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" onfocus="if (value == 'Search research database') {value='';style.color = '#000000'}" onblur="if (value== '') {value='Search our Research Database'; style.color = '#888'}" type="text">
<input name="site" value="010271135929600000/RWWS3A1442269/Conservation Agriculture" type="hidden">
<input name="submit" value="Search" type="submit">
</form>

If you just replace http://www.refworks.com/refshare/? by
https://www.zotero.org/groups/<group name>/items/q/ and remove the hidden input, you should get a basic title/creator/year search in the Zotero library.
To make it an "everything" search (which I'm not sure how well it works currently to be honest), you'd have to add /qmode/everything at the end of the submitted search URL. I don't know the html form code for this off the top of my head, but shouldn't be hard.

To have the entire search happen on a locally displayed version of the library would be significantly more effort, of course. You'd have to run libZotero locally (which is certainly possible, but seems to go a lot further than what you're trying to do here).

jpk15

Thanks--I'll have the patron make this change in their html file. Much appreciated.

Jim

adamsmith

Please do let us know if that works -- I did this on the quick and obviously w/o checking, so I'd want to know if this works as desired.