Magic Wand - slow to respond

gbennettnew
Hi. This might be a problem that just I'm having, but in case it's a more general issue - is anyone else having a very slow-to-respond magic wand when inputting ISBNs? The data does eventually come through but it takes a good couple of minutes, when it used to be instantaneous for me.
  • dstillman
    edited December 7, 2021
    ISBNs are slower than other identifiers, because there's no central authoritative source — Zotero just has to check various services (Library of Congress, WorldCat, etc.), not all of which are optimized for fast lookups.

    It certainly shouldn't take two minutes, though, and that sounds like a problem with an upstream service (and possibly the lack of a sensible timeout on our side). Can you provide a Debug ID for an attempt that takes that long (and also post the ISBN here, if you don't mind)?
  • gbennettnew
    Many thanks, dstillman.

    Here's a Debug ID - D269003290.

    I suspect that it is my firm's IT department that has tightened up what interaction Zotero can have with the web in some way. I am new in my job, and I downloaded Zotero when I started. It worked fine for a while, but now, in addition to this problem, I no longer can use my connector on Amazon's site to harvest metadata. It just times out.

    Does this seem feasible? ie that my firm's IT security is blocking the interaction that Zotero has with some websites?
  • dstillman
    The log shows a 75-second delay — probably a timeout — for a request to http://lx2.loc.gov:210, which is the Library of Congress lookup service (and unfortunately isn't available via HTTPS). You'd have to ask your IT department, but it's possible that they're proxying connections on port 80 (HTTP) or 443 (HTTPS) but aren't proxying other ports (like 210), causing the attempt to connect over that port to eventually timeout.
  • gbennettnew
    Oh sorry - I didn't include an ISBN. This is the one I just tried - 9781473749382 - but it takes this long over every ISBN I try.
  • dstillman
    edited December 7, 2021
    Here's an example URL:

    http://lx2.loc.gov:210/LCDB?operation=searchRetrieve&version=1.1&query=bath.ISBN=^9781473749382&maximumRecords=1
  • gbennettnew
    Ah. Thanks very much, dstillman. I'll go to my IT department with that url and the information you have given above. Hopefully they will proxy port 210.

    Thanks again - this is very helpful.

    Greg
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