Right Column

Philipp.Nuske

Hi,
we (German engineering consulting company) are in the process of testing Zotero for our use.

My colleagues pointed out, that the "average user" is overwhelmed by the number of possible entrys in the right Panel.

Therefore, it would be great to somehow ... clean that up.

Can I hide all but the types which are relevant for us?
Can I have costum fields?
Are there other possibilities in order to guide the user towards those fields, he needs to actually fill in?

Thanks in advance
Philipp

noksagt

Not at this time. You can read a thorough discussion of these issues at https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/28929/right-column-looks-awful/

In training, you should emphasize the use of using translators over manual entry.

Fields are also vaguely ordered by importance, so you can say "fill in what you can until you reach XXX"

Philipp.Nuske

thanks for the answer.

If translators were an option, we would not have the problem :-(
Typically we have to cite lots of things which can not be automatically imported (laws, standards, data supplied by customers / government).

The "fill everything to XXX" does not work either: e.g. for the reports, we often have 6 empty lines before the (quite important) date-entry.

Since we are talking about explaining a new system to many new users (hundreds in my case) I would like to make the transition process as easy as possible.

As to the discussion you refered to:
adamsmith mentions that the right columne should be cleaned. ... ;-)
Besides, that discussions seems to be three years old...

noksagt

The last three posts are from Feb of this year. There is sporadic discussion in other threads, but that is a relatively good snapshot of the issue. It is something people generally agree could be improved, but that may not be prioritized and certainly will depend a great deal on the architecture of the next version.

Note zotero has translators for done sites that handle those types and I'd imagine that additional translators to cover sites you want may be lower hanging fruit that would create an even better experience.

adamsmith

But beyond that, no, there are no options for custom fields or hiding fields currently.

Philipp.Nuske

That is tooooo bad ;-)

Do I understand correctly that this could change with a future version? Are we talking about weeks ... years?

I am not sure what is meant by "zotero has translators for done sites". If getting new translators is lower hanging fruit: how do I do that?

e.g.
- laws: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/
- norms: https://www.vdi.de/richtlinie/vdi_3475_blatt_4-emissionsminderung_biogasanlagen_in_der_landwirtschaft_vergaerung_von_energiepflanzen_und/

thanks
Philipp

adamsmith

definitely not weeks. Likely years, but probably not many (i.e. could be as early as next year).

You can either code translators in house or pay someone to do it.
https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/translators/coding
To give you a sense, I charge between US$200 and 500 for typical import translator work, for example. The javascript required isn't hard, so good in-house IT would be able to do it, but it requires some degree of familiarization with the code. Likely not worth it for one or two, almost certainly if you want more than that.

noksagt

I am not sure what is meant by "zotero has translators for done sites".

"done" should have been "some" if I'd have checked what I typed on my phone. I'm still on my phone so can't checkthe sites in depth immediately. I didn't see download links for citation info so will need to see if there is structured metadata.

Philipp.Nuske

thanks for the help with regard to the translators.

I guess, changing the design of the right panel would be much more difficult?

adamsmith

Yes it's harder to do, but more importantly, it's harder to get into Zotero. Translators are individual files. They also don't really affect people who don't use the sites they're for. We look at them closely, but as long as it's clean and working code, we'll take it.

Layout changes affect every single Zotero user every day, so they get a _lot_ more scrutiny (and are likely not worth it given the architectural changes noksagt mentions above).

Philipp.Nuske

thanks for the information.
Please let me know if there are any new developments.