Zotero 5.0 for Firefox connector handles metadata of e-book sources strangely

ivett

The old connector was able to capture metadata perfectly from e-book databases such as Oxford Scholarship Online http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/ and SpringerLink. Now it recognizes chapters as web page from the Oxford site and it does tcapture the book level data either.
From SpringerLink only the metadata at chapter level are available and the users have to enter the metadata at book level.

bwiernik

Can you post specific URLs with issues?

This almost certainly doesn’t have anything to do with the connector versions, but instead with changes to these web sites. Oxford and Springer have a habit of changing their site layouts frequently.

adamsmith

SpringerLink is actually on purpose. We can't easily offer both book and chapters (I think -- we could revisit) and made a judgement call there at some point that overall importing chapters would be preferable.

We would need a URL for OUP, though (I don't think we've ever supported their ebooks).

ivett

SpringerLink - ok.


Example for Oxford Scholarship Online - http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299591.001.0001/acprof-9780199299591

You have supported their e-books. This was our second e-book collection we started to subscribe so when I have become a Zotero fan I did check it and have shown the students since then. Plus, my colleague had not updated her Zotero yet and she has just captured the data for an Oxford e-book perfectly.

adamsmith

I don't know what your co-worker is looking at but these import as webpages for me in 4.0 as well. Might be that they changed their site? We certainly never have had explicit support for this, but this may have worked with metadata they had on the page.
What I think might/should work is if you right-click on the Save to Zotero icon and select to save using the DOI.

adamsmith

@zuphilip @dstillman if technically possible, how would you feel about listing the whole book (marked as such) at the top of the Zotero.select list for SpringerLink? This isn't the first time this has come up and I think it should be technically feasible without too much trouble.

Ticket for OUP here: https://github.com/zotero/translators/issues/1388 (may take anywhere from days to months depending on who takes this up)

ivett

Thanks. Yes - the right-click shows the option saving using the DOI - and this partly solves the problem - at least the metadata at book level is ok but the chapters are still captured as web sites. In the previous version there was a drop down menu for the DOI option but right-click is fine........

Actually, this right-click and then DOI step solves the issue of capturing the metadata at book level as well from SpringerLink........

zuphilip

@adamsmith Besides the technical details I don't see any reason to not show the book as first item in a list during scraping chapter lists from Springer. However, IMO we should then exclude the PDF for the whole book from such a multiples page.

bwiernik

Is it possible to include the PDF if it is the only one selected, but exclude it if any specific chapters are also selected?

adamsmith

possible likely yes (we can just check the length of the object, I think) but I'm inclined to say that too much contingent behavior is just confusing and unhelpful -- that could also be an argument for including the book PDF in all cases, though.

I have no idea how people use this/are going to use this, which makes this extra tricky. If the most common behavior is to download everything or the book and the chapter you need, not getting the PDF seems best. If more commonly you grab _either_ book _or_ chapter, then we'd want it included.

zuphilip

To save the PDF manually, in the case we only want to save the metadata for the whole book, one needs 2 additional clicks and possibly one drag and drop.