Problem with my university library website (OPAC)

areteichi

Hi, I recently contacted my university library to ask them to restore the support for Zotero. The library website underwent a system upgrade last year and the compatibility with Zotero had been lost ever since then.

The IT support at the university kindly supplemented the system with a necessary code, and it now partially works with Zotero.

I can now save bibliographic information from the single item view (individual books, articles, etc.), but saving from a list of search results still does not seem to work (strangely, it works once in a while but most of the time not).

See, for example, these lists of results:

https://opac.ku.de/s/uei/de/2/1000100+=+"140702296"

https://opac.ku.de/s/uei/de/2/3000100+=+"11854523X"

The Zotero button does not show the folder icon as it should.

The IT person told me that the relevant information (COinS) is already in place, so it seems that they're not sure why it's not working.

Could anyone tell me what the problem could be? Thank you very much in advance!

noksagt

That works for me.

When you hover over the "Save to Zotero" icon, what do you see? When you click the drop-down, do you see an option for "Save to Zotero using 'COinS'"?

You can refer to https://www.zotero.org/support/troubleshooting_translator_issues

areteichi

Thank you very much for your quick reply.

No, I don't (when it's not working). I just see "Save to Zotero (Webpage)" on my Zotero button.

Again, it sometimes works but in many cases it doesn't. Could you possibly try the links a few times (perhaps after closing & opening the browser)?

noksagt

OK. Confirmed, but it isn't a Zotero issue. Sometimes, there are no COinS generated on the webpage. They seem to generate this on the fly & presumably the function occasionally times out. With no COinS, other tools (e.g. LibX) also can't interact with the content, so it seems best to advise those who maintain the OPAC of this issue.

areteichi

Thank you for your help once again.

Yeah, I was suspecting it was the issue with the library website. I guess what I'm wondering is, what can be done to the website so that Zotero functions properly on it?

Could you possibly provide me with a concrete solution or advise as to what the IT support team should do? I was told from them that they've done what they could and the website still isn't working 100%. I would greatly appreciate it if you could tell me exactly what needs to be modified or added. I can then offer them specific instructions.

adamsmith

The basic thing would be to report that their COinS isn't being generated reliably. We can't tell them how to fix this, obviously, that's up to them or the catalog vendor.

You can also use the Speichern --> RIS function of the catalog

For a more robust solution, we might want a proper translator for TouchPoint (that's the system used there and apparently in some other Southern German universities).

If you can find out from your IT contact if there's some way to get to MARC or some other data format that's a bit better than the RIS (which looks to be of poor quality) that would help. zuphilip is often interested in helping Zotero-related stuff along in Germany, so you may have a decent chance to get that done.

zuphilip

AFAIK TouchPoint is used by Bavarian libraries and they are organized more in a central way in Bavarian. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB) also uses TouchPoint and it seems to work much better with their configuration. Moreover, they provide a MarcXML and RDF link which could lead to better metadata quality. Maybe, this is helpful for your contact person in the library.

And yes, I am interested in a good translator for TouchPoint catalogues with high quality metadata from the (Bavarian) libraries. I could help on the translator side, but currently I don't see how to do that with these TouchPoint catalogues.

areteichi

Thanks for your advise as always.

Ok, I will tell the IT person about the problem with COinS then.

What you're suggesting me as an alternative - and perhaps a better solution - is that one could (potentially) write a Zotero translator based on a data generated by TouchPoint? And for that purpose, it would be helpful to request a data in another format such as MARC?

If I understood these points correctly, I will go ahead and report them to the IT team.

adamsmith

Correct, yes. MarcXML (which BSB actually provides under "Mehr zum Titel") is pretty ideal and apparently TouchPoint can already do that in general, so I'd suggest that.

The easier we can get to that data -- a simple link, or just something like ?format=marc to be added to the URL -- the quicker we could use that in a translator.

areteichi

> zuphilip
> adamsmith

Thanks once again. I've just written to the responsible person. I'll report back when I find something out.

zubbuzu

Hi, I'm the "responsible person" for the TouchPoint catalogue of the university library areteichi mentioned above.

Unfortunately, the TouchPoint catalogue of BSB contains a number of extensions which are not part of the standard-version of TouchPoint, for example, the link to MARC-XML data. This could, however, easily be integrated in other TouchPoint installations, but only for results from local catalogue. For results from e.g. the union catalogue this is not as easy (by the way also not at BSB).
Therefore, it would still be useful to achieve a reliable COinS integration in TouchPoint. Perhaps the following information might be helpful: The hitlists including COinS are fetched asynchronously via Ajax request. Perhaps the COinS arrives too late to be recognized by Zotero. Again, BSB has made a modification to standard Touchpoint: At BSB, hitlists are not loaded via Ajax. Maybe for this reason COinS in TouchPoint hitlists works reliably at BSB.

adamsmith

yeah, if the COinS appears after the browser registers the page as loaded, Zotero wouldn't register it. Not sure what to do about that...
No other way to get at good, structured underlying data? Needn't be MarcXML, though that's easiest.

zuphilip

The library people can also try to add some additional lines to their JavaScript to force Zotero to reload metadata: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/exposing_metadata#force_zotero_to_refresh_metadata

zubbuzu

@zuphilip: Yes, it works! Thanks for this hint! That's exactly what I was looking for.

Nevertheless, I'm happy to help finding a better solution for connecting TouchPoint to Zotero. I suggest that we start with MARC-XML. It is quite easy to produce, at least for local data. How should it be presented in TouchPoint hitlists and hits so that Zotero can use it? Could you give some examples?
If we find such a solution for a TouchPoint translator, I can share it with other bavarian libraries also using TouchPoint.

adamsmith

From our perspective, what I say above applies: any easy way to get to MarcXML (simple URL extension like ?format=march or an easy to identify link on the page) is all we need. Ideally this would work more or less the same across TouchPoint installations.
We'd then write the translator which would be easy.

The alternative would be to use unAPI
https://web.archive.org/web/20141218062835/http://unapi.info/
and serve marc, which then wouldn't require anything on our part (Zotero just recognizes that) but is a bit more effort on your side. Let me know if you'd like examples for that.