handle.net doesn't work in standalone

John_muccigrosso

Following up on this post:

Instead, enter the URL at the top of the page into the URL field: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/44667

Entering a handle URI at the "magic wand" works for me in my web library, but not on the standalone. Instead I get: "Zotero could not find any identifiers in your input. Please verify your input and try again."

Is that expected?

bwiernik

The Add by Identifier in the desktop app only accepts ISBNs, DOIs, and PubMed IDs, not arbitrary URLs (like this one). To save a URL to the desktop app, open the URL in your browser and click the Save to Zotero button in your browser’s toolbar.

John_muccigrosso

Thanks. (I do know about the save-to-Zotero function.)

Can I therefore make this a feature request, that the Add by Identifier recognize text that has the hdl.handle.net in it? Or that it just add handle.net to the source it checks identifiers against?

adamsmith

There's no metadata lookup for handle (that's one of the biggest advantages of DOIs over handles), so this won't be possible I'm afraid. The handle services itself just helps ensure the stability of the links.

John_muccigrosso

So it’s not possible to simply imitate the website behavior in the standalone?

adamsmith

It's technically possible but not done on purpose:
The website add-by-identifier just treats the handle as any other URL and that functionality is purposefully left out of Zotero's desktop add by identifier function because the quality of import using the browser connector is going to be better, in some cases significantly so. Having import by URL in Zotero would be confusing and suggest it's an equivalent feature to browser import.

John_muccigrosso

I’m not so sure about that. I ended up doing a website import, then editing the entry, which is what I would have done if the standalone had done the adding. I just had to to the website to do it. More steps.

dstillman

It's not that they would never be equivalent — it's that, frequently, a URL import in Zotero would be worse. Zotero doesn't have access to browser cookies for site logins and session state, can't use a web-based proxy that you log into in your browser to gain access to gated materials, and can't save from JavaScript-rendered sites that don't have proper permalink handling. People obviously shouldn't be expected to understand those details, and so providing it as an option would just make for a bad experience much of the time.

John_muccigrosso

OK, thanks.