Share on Local Servers
We are involved in a grant project where we are trying to locate and preserve digital copies of fragile online records of news events. We will have 20-30 librarians locating these files and saving them locally using Zotero.
The challenge we’re running in to is the difficulty associated with sharing Zotero databases across several users. I have been closely following the forums/roadmap and am interested in the new features included in version 2.0 that will enable users to share Zotero databases with other users.
It appears that the shared Zotero databases will be stored on Zotero servers.
Due to security concerns, we’re curious if there will also be a way to share on a local network in version 2.0. Or, has a 3rd party plugin been developed along those lines? Does anyone have any ideas and/or guidance for our situation?
Thanks!
Matt
The challenge we’re running in to is the difficulty associated with sharing Zotero databases across several users. I have been closely following the forums/roadmap and am interested in the new features included in version 2.0 that will enable users to share Zotero databases with other users.
It appears that the shared Zotero databases will be stored on Zotero servers.
Due to security concerns, we’re curious if there will also be a way to share on a local network in version 2.0. Or, has a 3rd party plugin been developed along those lines? Does anyone have any ideas and/or guidance for our situation?
Thanks!
Matt
Thanks for your reply. User-defined storage (WebDAV) would be nice... I'll echo Rintze's question, might that also include local or network drives?
Our concerns deal with the subject matter we are collecting, not the security and privacy offered by Zotero (we trust you). This news release of the grant describes the project in a bit more detail - http://www.lib.utexas.edu/about/news/bridgeway_grant.html.
Out of curiosity... any plans to also allow us to store and sync metadata in user-defined storage?
In my turn, I would like to echo mlisle's remark. Due to the confidential nature of the work in my research group (most research is performed in collaboration with industry, and we want to avoid giving away research leads), we would like to keep the information we collect as private as possible. This also extends to metadata, as even the specific collections of papers we collect could reveal our research focuses.
That's great! Any chance that will be included in 2.0?
re: Metadata - I'm guessing we'll still have the option to export the metadata from the zotero servers to a local location. That true?
Thanks again...
One is a handy duplicate detection and merge that we miss extremely in our group.
We have all different bibtex files with small differences and its pain in the ass to eliminate duplicates!
The second is local sync server. We can't use internet server. No way :-(
Without duplicate elimination and sync, we can't handle our research with zotero.
However Zotero is really nice, great job!
But Please, Please add these two important things.
Until now the lack of a server prevents us to switch to zotero (even if we really would like to).
We had a discussion here about Refworks too. But our conclusion was that we will not hand over our precious data and research to a server we do not control. And as far as I can see this will remain so for a few years to come.
Because of many conversations about this topic and 2 big threads in the Zotero forums I think that many users share this point of view.
The Zotero team hasn't expressed much enthusiasm for dedicating programmer time to making this easy. This is I think in part b/c the Zotero 2.0 vision is essentially based on a centralized hub (though needn't be, I might add).
For those research companies and institutes (as well as universities) that really consider this critical, can you imagine contributing to filling this gap?
Of course, the code has to be available first.
I don't think that things must be easy. I appreciate that a server is a complex piece of software and that it takes some time to get things like that up and running. And with time people share their knowledge, help improving routines and write wikis.
Yet I may share some thoughts. I did not realize that the vision of Zotero has shifted that far. As I first get to know Zotero I had high hopes (2-3 years ago). At that time a server was an essential part of the vision and I had not the impression that it should be closed source or centralized. I very well realized that it took far more time to develop the teamwork features but that is understandable and I am really looking forward to the new possibilities. But if I now hear that the only thing that would make me and a lot of colleagues switch to Zotero may will never come I feel as I did bet on the wrong horse all the time.
BTW: A local server would be something that would make Zotero unique. Because if we are serious: There are a few research tools which are OS and also quite good. Yet a real client/server system is missing until now (as you stated quite correctly above).
The reason i ask is that there are a load of other locally installable collaboration tools - wiki's for example - that could be used to augment/replace some of the zotero.org online functionality without affecting the zotero.org vision or other goals. It would seem to be something that could be solved with some extra documentation, and It could even serve to suggest new zotero.org features.
That is assuming some or all of the metadata syncing is redundant with local access to the user libraries, or could be done via the plugin with read access to the metadata portion local users zotero libraries?
Although, if I may specify our clients' own concerns about sharing data in the cloud, I would say that:
- storing in the cloud (which can be in another country than our client is in) disqualifies most client from coverage by their professional responsibility insurance;
- raises concerns when you cannot certify that all data is transferred over HTTPS.
Yet again, the cloud works well to motivate cooperation between organizational units.
Has the server code even been released yet?
Couldn't you just release the source of the server like bdarcus said? This way we could continue using your great tool!
This is great news indeed.
However, for collaboration purposes, a ZeroConf (Bonjour) feature, which would allow to see other people's shared libraries over a local area network, would probably do the job. I think it would match most of the needs expressed here and would involve less hassle than maintaining a proper server locally.
I understand that this feature was experimented some time ago for Mac OS X users, and there are still its embryos in Zotero's source. Does anyone know what the issues were, and what needs to be done to solve them? I might be able to contribute some effort but I need to understand the situation first.