best practice to capture and publish zotero citations on a web page?

mm2001
I'm building a website that would like to capture citations as part of other data entry on a web page. I'm wondering what the simplest way from a user perspective is to do this while retaining as much structured citation data as possible?

Similar but opposite, once the citations are captured, what's the preferred way to display them on a page (or hidden within a page using tags) so that zotero can easily import them?

Ideally this would require no extra plugins or changes to default settings to keep it as simple as possible for users.

I've read the developer docs and looked at the wordpress tools at http://dev.zotero.org/wordpress but they seem a little specific and/or cumbersome for an average user. Is there a better analogue?

thx in advance!
  • mm2001
    Exploring more, it appears at first glance that setting a Site Specific setting of MODS gets a very complete output format - but I'm surprised there is no Zotero RDF option. So, two follow-on questions:

    1) is there a way for a web page to automatically setup a Site Specific export setting and/or indicate on the page, or run some Javascript to do this?

    2) what is the most desirable format to export and retain, with a view to making it available again for Zotero to import?

    thx, michael
  • noksagt
    edited October 1, 2008
    You can make data available to Zotero with UnAPI+MODS XML. This is very robust, isn't TOO difficult to setup (slightly harder than something like COinS, but certainly within the reach of a webapp developer).

    It is not 100% clear to me what you want to do as far as getting data from zotero int your site. A zotero plugin would seem to be ideal. Otherwise, just give instructions on how to setup quick copy. There is no way for a site to mandate a quick copy format (and there probably should NOT be one).

    I have played with all of these methods in my webapp, and can help more if you have specific questions.
  • mm2001
    thanks!

    UnAPI + MODS pretty much answers both questions. If we want to publish what we capture, then we should capture in MODS. And MODS itself looks easy enough to parse for the simple citation display format we'll need to generate (hmm, now if we could link into Zotero from javascript and dynamically generate the cite in the user's preferred display format from our stored MODS that would be cool!).

    For facilitating the import, I guess instructions are the best route. Certainly good enough for now. By the time we explain to our (unsophisticated) users how to install a plug in, we could step them through a Site Specific export quick copy format setup. It would be nice though for a web page to be able to specify which quick copy format it wants so Zotero can automagically adapt.

    Thanks again for the pointers!

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