Email alerts to Zotero?

amartel5

Hello,

I'm an academic librarian. Many faculty members at our institution receive email alerts for new research in their areas. I'm wondering if there is a way for us to set up an email filter to forward these results directly to Zotero.

Not all of our library resources generate RSS feeds, so this would be a major improvement to their workflows. Specifically, I'd love to have an option similar to Trello where Zotero has an email address that, when emailed, automatically adds results to the library.

Is this feature that has already been requested, or is it a pipe dream?

Thanks!
Alli

dstillman

This would be tricky without creating parsers for individual email alert services.

If every result contained a DOI, that would be one thing (though then people could already just paste them into Add Item by Identifier). But if they were just links, it would be very hard for Zotero to know what was a resource to save and what was just a random link in the HTML email.

And regardless, the problem with saving not through the Zotero Connector is that you wouldn't get non-open-access attached PDFs. People with on-campus or VPN-based access to PDFs could use Find Available PDF, but that doesn't work for the much more common web-based proxy setups. (That's the case with Add Item by Identifier and the built-in feed reader too, though.)

amartel5

Thanks! Unfortunately, the results themselves are hit-or-miss as to whether or not DOIs are included.

We've gotten the faculty member set up with proxied database feeds, which should hopefully suffice for now.