Two people working on same OO document. how to share libraries?

jjjjjjjjjj
I have a problem that I did not see an easy solution to--sharing bibliographies in a shared, jointly edited paper. Hopefully not a noob problem. Any suggestions or work-arounds would be be most appreciated. Did not, however, see answer in forum.

Two people with quite extensive and sometimes overlapping biblio libraries want to work on a OpenOffice document together, including (ideally) both of us adding some references, over time.

It seems, however, that Zotero extension cannot find a reference (even though it sometimes there) when the OO file is copied to the other person, it complains that the reference is not found and wants to remove it. (by the way, it seems to ask for EACH one in a window warning, this is painful when > 50 references, clicking on >50 "no" buttons, Was there a way to respond "no, for all" once?)

There seems to be no way I can see to easily export or share the small subset of references cited in this paper for a production of a shared document.

The paper, itself, will probably only contains a total of under 100 references. If one could export just the referenced citations in paper, maybe we could kluge up something, but as stands this seems impossible if have to merge this...the duplicated entries across the entire database themselves would be horrible and essentially screw up both of our databases.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!
  • bdarcus
    It's not your oversight; it's current limitation. Right now, citations in your document are tied to Zotero in general, and to a specific database instance in particular. So you have to use the same database.

    I believe the Zotero team is working on fixing that (hopefully moving to more generic support), but I don't have any specifics (for example, ETA).
  • jjjjjjjjjj
    edited February 8, 2009
    Thanks, but this seems to be a major "use-case" The only major one I see missing in Zotero.

    It seems there are three different things that could move toward making this better, at least if I understand the issues.

    1) Fix the plug in warning dialog for missing data to accept ALL missing references.

    Even if a co-author is not planning to add any references, when they look at a new draft document and if they have zotero add-on installed I think they get a warning dialog box for each "missing" reference. Worse, if they accidently hit "yes" once or twice they start removing references in a draft--that may not be noticed by original author. Having the "plug in warning dialog" for missing references allow you ignore ALL missing references, would at least allow the other person to edit text.

    You should be able to look at drafts where you do not intend to change references without being pestered by an avalanche of dialog warning boxes. Am I missing something?

    2) Easily export all the references cited in a paper or create a collection from a paper. This would of value for editing of papers where full blown synching of documents is overkill. It would also be useful for teaching. (e.g. lecture notes with an optional file of Zotero-formatted bibliography for input into their Zotero).

    3) Exporting/importing or synching the entire reference collection among co-authors? This is likely to be overkill for many kind of co-authored documents.

    These all three need to be supported, it seems. Failure to allow for one and two might kill general acceptance of Zotero in some areas. In bioscience, at least, a lot of papers have co-authors that you may not work with again or work with often. In some cases, many co-authors do not need or want to change the references...but the Zotero plugin warning dialog for missing data may make it hard to even look at text of draft without uninstalling the plugin, restarting, and then reopening the file and reinstalling if you are using zotero on other document. The synching of entire database would be overkill for many casual co-authors, as well.
  • bdarcus
    edited February 8, 2009
    It's an important issue (indeed, I've said so many times), but ti's not trivial. Do a search in the archives for some discussion from Dan Stillman.

    Aside: I have some connection to both the OpenOffice and the OpenDocument projects, and my ideal use case is actually even more general than your's; namely, that different users should be able to collaborate on the same document even if they use different applications (both word-processing and bibliographic database). I believe meeting this use case is both possible, and highly desirable. But it's still not trivial to do right.
  • bdarcus
    edited February 8, 2009
    Actually, thinking out loud, here's what I'd like to see ultimately: applications like Zotero:

    1. encode their citations and store their related bibliographic data in-document in generic ways

    2. links between citations and bibliographies rely on similarly generic, and global, IDs (URIs)

    3. bibliographic metadata is stored as a file in the XML archive; in OOXML, it uses the standard schema, in ODF 1.2, it uses RDF

    4. each data file includes a time-stamp, and potentially other metadata that makes it easier to sync data across users and applications

    It seems to me that sort of design can achieve what we'd like to see, and separates out particular concerns so that some of the most difficult pieces (like, say, syncing data) are fairly isolated.

    I think there will probably still need to be some changes with the major WP client applications (MS Word, and OpenOffice) to make this possible, though.
  • jjjjjjjjjj
    Obviously general solutions might be ultimately better, but all my words should not lose sight there is one (likely-to-be) quick fix for the OO plug-in that gets us somewhere very useful.

    "1) Fix the plug in warning dialog for missing data to accept ALL missing references."

    A colleague that I was encouraging to use zotero and plug-in will probably have to uninstall Zotero plug in OO, just so he see my draft without many dialog box warnings. Not a great way to spread word/use of great tool.

    An obvious hack, but if that "accept all" option could happen, all co-authors can be warned only once per document open. In that case, then one person manages references and the others can still edit the draft, and maybe insert references as URIs for the "reference-master" to add.

    "Remove all" would probably be a dangerous option, perhaps continue to force remove to be confirmed each time.
  • bdarcus
    edited February 8, 2009
    What happens if your colleague gets the document, does an "accepts all," and then adds new citations? Zotero has no way to know what citations belong to what user.
  • alpouchi
    edited February 23, 2009
    I've got the same problem on my own while working on two different computers.

    If you want to work with two databases and zotero to make link between two, you've got to import your firefox profile from one computer to another into :
    c:\Documents and Settings\User\Applicationdata\mozilla\firefox\profiles

    then be sure that firefox is closed and use the execute command from the starting menu of windows, type : "firefox.exe -profilemanager"

    Create a new profile and select the "dossier" (don't know how to translate) you've just import. Then click "finished"

    Now you just have to choose this profile to edit you're article as if you were on your other computer.
  • danwoodard
    I even tried setting the storage location to be on a flash drive with the document, but even though zotero opened the storage folder and had all the same references, I still got the message that the references were no longer in the database. I assume zotero ties each reference to a specific file in a database, not just a specific file in the selected storage database. But is that level of discrimination really needed? Why not allow zotero to "read" the references in the bibliography of the paper and add them to its database?

    BTW I am a (struggling) researcher and this is a wonderful program. The number of nits just means people are using it. Keep up the good work!
  • danwoodard
    If Zotero could import the bibliography of a document as a separate folder in its library database, so that the references could be accessed but would not duplicate or overwrite entries in the main Zotero library, than the document would be truly portable between computers. This could be presented as an additional choice ("import references from document") in the OpenOffice dialog that indicates a citation is no longer in the database. Possibly the references could be stored as an SQL file embedded in the document file.

    Zotero is so good that it deserves the resources to become better.
  • sean
    Zotero groups with shared libraries, coming very soon, will provide a clean solution to this problem.
  • bdarcus
    I hope, Sean, you don't think that this (a still Zotero-specific approach) is the end of the solution.
  • dstillman
    Bruce, as I've said to you before, we don't. It's just the solution that will provide the best experience for Zotero server users.
  • bdarcus
    OK Dan. Forward movement is a good thing in any case.
  • sean
    I completely agree with your sentiments, Bruce, but please note that I said Zotero groups with shared libraries will provide a clean solution, not the only solution.
  • kbares
    I'd love to see a detailed description of what's planned for the groups with shared libraries.
  • bdarcus
    @sean: what is "clean" is a matter of perspective. The solution you describe I'm pretty sure relies on all people being Zotero users, and all of those users belonging to the same group. What I'm saying (and I've been saying for the past few years) is that while this is a practical interim step, it's a pretty unacceptable state of affairs in general. It's borderline ridiculous, for example, that there's now a new application competing for mindshare (Meneldey), which uses CSL as well, but which has it's own code for formatting references, no doubt using its own custom fields, and ultimately completely incompatible with Zotero's.

    I know Dan has been thinking about this, but I just want to keep the long-term goal in broad view.
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