Is there a way to collaborate and share Metadata in Zotero. Help!

ronan-wave-venture

It seems like there is no way to share & pool high quality metadata via the internet. Is this correct or have I missed something? This should be a key web2.0 type feature which should fit with the Zotero concept but I can't find any feature for doing this.

Hundreds of people must download each paper and attach the same patchy google scholar metadata and manually correct and in-fill, author, publisher, key words... Am I missing something here? If I go through that process for one paper I want to upload the metadata that I corrected to a server and in turn download metadata for a thousand other papers that other people have uploaded. Is this too much to ask?

Maybe the feature is already there but I can't find it. Help? Or is there some copyright on metadata that prevents this kind of co-operation?

noksagt

You can share "metadata" and files within groups of people and revisions to that information would propagate to members of the group.

But, no: there is no way currently to improve the "Retrieve Metadata for PDF" function. I'm also not sure if I see the utility of that: there are actually MANY possible PDFs for a give reference (legacy articles are scanned by one or more parties and even new articles often have trackers to identify the original downloader and/or a publisher makes one high res version, one version with active links, etc.).

It is true that CrossRef's data is often limited and, using DOIs, they are often the first place that we check. But I don't think looking at filehashes is the solution....

ronan-wave-venture

@noksagt - Thanks for your reply. I've edited my question to make it more focused on the issue at hand. (I've removed the aside relating to file hash digests)

The problem is that more that half of my reference library has no online metadata availability. There is a community of fellow users of these files. But they are disparate and not in same groups. Is there a way for this community to collaborate on solving this problem? Is it possible to have a user built collective metsdata source? Surely this is a solvable problem?

adamsmith

Mendeley is already doing this. I think there are some plans to implement this on zotero at a limited level, but the technical challenges are actually quite significant

ronan-wave-venture

@noksagt. I take your point about the multiple files for the same paper. But in the case of scanned old papers the number of users is likely to be higher than the number of scanners. And in the case of the journals that give each user a different file on download these are the files that have DOI embedded anyway. It is the conference papers, project reports, industry reports, government reports that would benefit from linking file hashes to metadata.