Use group data without being a member

olivier.cailloux
I would like to offer public visibility to some references I maintain. They have attached PDF files that I do not want to share publicly. The PDF files should be viewable only by a restricted number of persons.

My idea: open a public group with closed membership. Anyone can read, only members can view the attached files. Seems to fill my needs.

The problem: I don’t understand how a non-member can use the group data in an easy way. She could see the data through the web interface, but AFAIU many important zotero features are missing because she can't access it through her personal zotero library. E.g., how can she copy items from the group library to her personal library? How can she export some references in Bibtex? I didn’t find any way to do it through the web interface.

Am I missing something? Is there a better way for me to achieve my goals? My goals are: 1) easy use of the references for the broad public 2) access to the PDFs only for restricted members.

Thanks a lot.
  • mark
    No, you are not missing something, the current groups system is somewhat rigid and inadequate for many purposes at present.

    There is a fairly well thought-out proposal (if I may say so myself) for better roles for group libraries, but so far the relevant developers have not provided any indication that they are aware of the inadequacies of the current system or of the proposed improvements. Perhaps your support for the proposal might help.
  • olivier.cailloux
    mark, thanks for your answer.

    I am not convinced changing roles would improve the situation for me. I am happy with the current anonymous, or unsubscribed, or what you call “viewer”, role. AFAIU, it’s just that currently that role can’t really do much anything useful because appropriate tools are lacking.

    A better improvement, for me, would consist in making users non-subscribed to my group able to see the library in their group libraries, without subscribing. Thus, making them able to see the library content without the attachments. This does not consist in extending their permissions or adding a new role, it seems to me, as the viewer role (anonymous / unsubscribed, as you prefer), already has all the needed permissions. Only zotero currently lacks the appropriate feature.

    This is not to say that your proposal seems bad to me, only it would not exactly solve my specific problem.
  • adamsmith
    well, users can easily import items into Zotero from the web-view - note the translator icon in the URL bar for the library view, e.g. here:
    https://www.zotero.org/groups/political_economy_of_modern_treaties_-_canada/items
  • olivier.cailloux
    Ah, good news! I hadn’t seen it because I was running an old version of zotero.

    Now the main missing feature for us is export to bibtex. It would be great if it was available from the web interface, or easier to do.

    The main use case we are interested in is: easily being able to grab the bibtex-encoding of a reference, and paste it into the user main (pre-existing) file where she stores every bibtex references of interest for her work. That’s because most people in the community I am involved with use latex and hence bibtex.

    Currently our users would need to 1) import the ref to zotero (creating an account first if they do not have one); 2) right-click and export to bibtex; 3) go to their hard disk, where the exported file lies, open it, copy the contents.

    So the import items to zotero solution is far from perfect. Though it is much better than I had expected, so thanks again for the hint.
  • adamsmith
    afaik export from the web interface is planned - I assume both in bibliographic formats and in RIS/bibtex etc. - though I can't give you an ETA

    Note that steps 2)/3) can be turned into a single step using quick copy:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/creating_bibliographies#quick_copy
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