zotero and Newspapers.com

aaronbcowan

Is there any reason Zotero would not be properly importing publication info, etc. for articles found in newspapers.com? I am only able to download metadata for each article as a webpage. The URL it grabs does take me directly to what I was looking at when I click the "add" button, so that's better than nothing - but all the publication info and date are empty, so it's useless for citations. I'm running latest versions of the standalone and browser extension, and updated translators....any suggestions?

dstillman

Example URL?

aaronbcowan

http://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/73082453/?terms=butler+county+home&pqsid=16RWpoHBOY8l55MXJKvWgQ:422000:1910245777

dstillman

It looks like our newspapers.com translator currently only works on URLs beginning with https://www.newspapers.com/clip/. I'm not sure if your URL is for a different part of the site that's not currently supported or if the site simply changed.

aaronbcowan

I think newscomwc in the URL is for the "World collection" in their Library Editions https://www.proquest.com/products-services/Newspaperscom-Library-Edition.html

Since this undoubtedly how a lot of university-affiliated users will access Newspapers.com, it would be nice if the translator could be updated!

aaronbcowan

@dstillman Is there a process for requesting this be corrected?

dstillman

When you're browsing the World Collection, are you still able to click through to /clip URLs? Because zotero/translator#1666 suggests that /image URLs may not be ideal for citing anyway. If you can still get /clip URLs on newscomwc.newspapers.com, supporting them may be as simple as updating the translator's URL matching, which is currently restricted to the www subdomain.

aaronbcowan

@dstillman Thanks for the reply. The "clip" function doesn't actually work with our institutional subscription - you get a login box that asks for a personal account. So I use the Print/Save function instead.

adamsmith

I believe @pbinkley wrote that newspapers.com translator. I don't have any access to the site, neither personal nor institutional, so can't help, but he may be able to.

pbinkley

I've only ever used a personal account, and I didn't know there was an institutional account option with a different domain. The first thing to try would be to edit the translator to apply to the newscomwc domain as @dstillman suggests (or even to all of *.newspapers.com, in case there are other variants for other services). I can have a look at this over the weekend; but since my personal account is inactive at the moment, and I don't have access to the newscomwc service, I may not be able to reproduce the problem.

dstillman

(But if @aaronbcowan doesn't have access to /clip URLs anyway then a target change wouldn't be sufficient, though other "World Collection" subscribers could potentially still benefit.)

pbinkley

I finally had a look, and clarified my understanding. If the newscomwc version of the site doesn't allow you to create clippings, then the current functionality of the translator can't help. If we enhance the translator to handle /image urls as well as /clip ones, the limitation is that there's no article-level metadata to capture. @aaronbcowan would you want the translator to create a newspaper article item and attach the page image, and leave the title empty for you to fill in? You would at least get the publication, place, date and page number fields that way, I think.

Out of curiosity: do you see clippings that have been created via personal accounts? I've created one for the "Butler County Home Crowded" item in your sample link. Do you get a clickable blue box around that item when you mouse over it now?

aaronbcowan

@pbinkley finally coming back to your post about a year later! Apologies - I must have missed your reply last fall.

This remains a problem for me, and for my student researchers.
Yes, if the translator were at least able to recognize it as a newspaper article and pull the other metadata, filling in the article title would be pretty simple.

To answer your other question, I can see clippings created by personal accounts, but even when I go to the clipping page, Zotero still "sees" it as a webpage, not a newspaper article.

kleonard

I'm also having this issue. I rely heavily on Newspapers.com and currently have to spend a lot of time manually entering data into Zotero.