Support for importing RIS via connector

chad.haefele
edited December 3, 2021
I work at UNC Libraries, and we're making some improvements to our catalog. We have some incorrect data in our COinS and RIS formats.

For a number of reasons it'd be much easier if we could stop supporting COinS entirely and just fix our RIS files.

On a dev version of the catalog, we removed COinS as a test. But on that test, the Zotero connector / browser extension doesn't recognize the RIS file at all. Should the connector be detecting our RIS file? it's included like this:

<link rel="alternate" title="ris" type="application/x-research-info-systems" href="https://discovery.trln.org/catalog/UNCb1774078.ris"; />

(you won't be able to load that RIS file, it's IP-limited)

I'm very much not a software developer - I've looked at documentation but can't find a definitive answer to this. Thanks for any insight.
  • adamsmith
    We've long talked about recognizing metadata in rel="alternate" but that's not currently supported.
    That said -- you're using a blacklight discovery layer, right? Other blacklight catalogs like Stanford and Columbia have marcxml or mods in the alternate link -- would you be able to do that? With that in place, we could just enable UNC in the blacklight translator and it should work great.
    If that's not an option, we could also look at enabling RIS in the blacklight translator
  • chad.haefele
    Yes, we're blacklight-based. This is good to know, thanks - I'll take the option back to our developers.
  • chad.haefele
    side question - would zbib.org also pick up marcxml or mods?
  • adamsmith
    It uses the same translators as Zotero, so once we have UNC added to the blacklight translator*, yes.

    * since blacklight doesn't have a particularly distinctive URL pattern, we add catalogs individually to the regular expression for sites on which the translator runs.
  • chad.haefele
    Following up - if we did get our catalog added to the blacklight translator, would it prioritize marcxml or mods above COinS data?
  • adamsmith
    Yes. The blacklight translator doesn't even look at COinS (and takes priority over the generic COinS one)
  • dstillman
    We've long talked about recognizing metadata in rel="alternate" but that's not currently supported.
    We're making progress towards this, by the way, but it's tricky to not have it be a downgrade in usability. Zotero doesn't know what's in the linked file (no items, one item, multiple items, different item types) without requesting it, but it woudn'y really be reasonable to make an extra request for each RIS/etc. file on every page load, so it's not possible to show anything other than a folder icon. That's what we do for DOIs found on the page, for the similar reason of not wanting to query doi.org on every page load, but unlike embedded DOIs this would be a primary way we'd recommend people make metadata available to Zotero.

    One option would be to encourage use of a data-* attribute (e.g., "data-zotero-item-type") on the <link> to communicate the Zotero item type of the linked resource, or "multiple". It'd be Zotero-specific, of course, but it's optional — if a site didn't include it, Zotero users would just see a folder icon if no other translator triggered. And lots of sites include buttons or other export options for other tools.
  • chad.haefele
    After a gap, we're looking at enhancing Zotero support in our catalog again. I wanted to check in on the status of RIS detection via rel="alternate". Is that still in the works?
  • adamsmith
    edited November 21, 2023
    I think so, but don't we support UNC via blacklight?

    Edit: oh right didn't get there above, but what I say still holds. With marcxml or mods in rel we'd just be able to add the unc catalog to the list in blacklight and that'd give you the best support
  • chad.haefele
    we were not able to add marcxml or mods to our records, which I think was a requirement to be added to the blacklight translator. Is that right?
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