ATLAS

arggem · September 6, 2008

I'm back with my request for ATLAS.

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15/?Focus=945#Comment_945
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15/?Focus=3835#Comment_3835

OVID and EBSCOhost appear to be "for Institutional Subscribers Only"

I am a subscriber through the ATLAS site itself. My institution doesn't have a subscription.

Please, I'm wasting time doing manual entries that Zotero is designed to eliminate and I'm now getting heavy into my dissertation research. Is there a reason a translator can't be developed for this site?

Hoping for help! :)

EDIT: Ooops. Sorry. I meant to add this to this thread

scot · September 6, 2008

Yes, this would be a very nice addition, especially if it can auto-download the associated PDFs. I suppose one limitation in getting it done is that you have to find a developer who has access to ATLAS (without going through OVID or EBSCOhost, which is how many institutions will get their ATLAS, if I'm not mistaken). Perhaps one could work out limited-time developer access with ATLA directly.

Can you offer any help at getting any willing developers hooked up to a database?

Or perhaps (they say that translators are not too hard) you might be able to pull it off yourself. The tutorials here are very good:
http://dev.zotero.org/creating_translators_for_sites

ATLAS, for reference, is an excellent database and online fulltext collection of major religion and theology journals
http://www.atla.com/products/catalogs/catalogs_atlas.html

By the way, is there any indication that your independant ATLAS subscription is using a third party 'platform' to deliver their database. It may be if they are using some standard database web platform, that the whole process of getting a translator to recognize the data will be quite easy indeed.

arggem · September 6, 2008

By the way, is there any indication that your independant ATLAS subscription is using a third party 'platform' to deliver their database.

I really don't know. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to these matters. I'm just a user. :)

I'll take a look at creating a translator. "Not too hard," huh? Does that mean "easy"?

Thanks for seconding my request, and yeah, auto down is very much a part of what I would like Zotero to do.

scot · September 6, 2008

Well, no, 'not too hard' in this case only means 'well documented' and 'pretty logical.' It does still take knowledge of some programming concepts. You can appreciate that the set of people who (a) have access to ATLAS and (b) can do JavaScript and (c) have the time and willingness to put something together, may be quite small, so you'll want to do everything you can to make it easy for any developer who shows an interest. Anyone?

arggem · September 6, 2008

LOL...yeah, that probably is a pretty small group, huh?

I downloaded Scaffold and succesfully got through the target and


function detectWeb(doc, url) {
    if(doc.title == "ATLAS - Brief Citations") {
        return "journalArticle";
    }
}

So, I got the icon in the address bar. I was so excited!

I also got the FireFox console fired up.

But I got lost at the Building the Screen scraper logic stage.

How do I know what to put here?

How do I know how the ATLAS page is coded?

This is all I see when I View Page Source


<html><head><title>ATLAS - Brief Citations</title></head>
<frameset framespacing="0" border="0" cols="19%,*" resize="no" frameborder="0">
<frame name="frnavis"  src="http://search.atlaonline.com/citesidebarb.html" marginwidth="2" marginheight="2" scrolling="auto" noresize>
<frame name="frpage" marginwidth="0" src="http://search.atlaonline.com/pls/eli/eli.pdfsearch.search?D1=All+Years&C1=ON&C3=ON&lcombine=and&fts1=fellowship+spirit&ftbox1=10&pft=false" noresize>
</frameset></html>

I'd be happy to try and work on this, but it appears that I'll need a little remedial help. The last programming I did was with GW Basic, and that was just stuff I picked up along the way. I've been lost since Visual Basic.