Upgrade StorageATLA Religion Database
I use the ATLA Religion Database through the University of Wisconsin-Madison and while Zotero displays the article icon on the address line and captures references, it puts all the reference information into the Publication field. I suspect that this is due to how ATLA arranges its data (at least on the screen it puts all the reference info on a line labeled Source).
Is there any way to resolve this problem now?
Will it be addressed in the future?
Can anyone suggest another major Religion journal database that is better supported by Zotero at present?
Thank you--up to this point I was loving Zotero, but this could be a significant problem for me using it.
Is there any way to resolve this problem now?
Will it be addressed in the future?
Can anyone suggest another major Religion journal database that is better supported by Zotero at present?
Thank you--up to this point I was loving Zotero, but this could be a significant problem for me using it.
For a book section: title, author, publication title, date and page range are scraped correctly. Zotero's 'Publisher' field gets the whole line including "City : Publisher, Date" (where it should only get the middle element).
Simple Book records fare somewhat better: Title, author, date, ISBN are good. Publisher ends up with a comma at the end, and the "Place" field also has trailing punctuation. But text ends up in the correct fields. Book editors get imported as authors (which is easy enough to fix), and series titles don't get imported at all.
Articles do not have their abstracts imported, and seem to have their month and year reversed. Otherwise they work (at first glance).
All these are artifacts of Zotero's screen scraping mechanism, I guess, combined with the particular way that our bibliographic reference providers display their information. A single "source" field is (I would think) very unlikely to be processed well on a consistent basis, though the problems that I see with trailing punctuation in the publisher-related fields could probably be fixed on Zotero's end. (A colon is a common separator between the City and name of a publisher, And a comma would never be included at the end of a Publisher's name. It's a separator. Zotero could be trained to drop these.)
To my knowledge there is no competitor to ATLA. For those in Religious studies who hope to use zotero (I'm trying to decide whether and how far I can use it for my PhD thesis), workable ATLA-zotero interaction is a must.
EBSCOhost is (as I understand it) a kind of aggregator of other search databases, which your university may subscribe to. It could well be that your university offers this (or another) way to search and access the same ATLA database, and Zotero may have better luck there.
The longer-term solutions are: (1) persuade whoever serves you the pages (ATLA, EBSCO, your Uni library) to clean things up a bit so zotero can read them, while also (2) improving zotero's screen scraping. OR (3: best of all if I understand things) persuade your database operator to insert COinS tags into their display of the data, as the new Copac (UK/Ireland university meta-catalogue) interface will have when it goes live next week . Then Zotero will have an much easier time landing everything in its correct fields, and adapting to interface changes, etc. As soon as I feel I understand the situation a little better, I'm going to start writing to the admins of the databases I use most to request this feature. It's not much for them, and it will help zotero (and other new tools) to glean bibliographic information reliably from their pages.
On COins <clipped from another zotero page>:
COinS—or Context Objects in Spans—is a community-based standard for encoding bibliographic information in web pages. By installing the plugin, you make it possible for not only Zotero, but also other COinS interpreters to recognize and process your metadata, thereby supporting a new generation of semantic web tools and services. Other sites that currently embed COinS include Wikipedia and WorldCat.