Progress Window "Retrieving Metadata" closes automatically?

bookhand
Hi, All - I'm new to Zotero, and trying to sort out years of disorganized PDFs. I'm dealing with a library of around 1300 items, and I would guess that 300-400 of them aren't OCRd.

On top of the Google Scholar query limits, I'm struggling to sort out which files Zotero is unable to retrieve metadata for, and which it cannot read as they haven't been OCRd. Annoyingly, the progress window closes automatically, before I can go through and identify which items are which. Is there any way to either 1) force the window not to close automatically, or 2) scan/filter the generated logs to see which items are which?

Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    sifting through the debug logs is going to be painful. You can search for unindexed files, which should catch mostly non-OCRd files (or other files Zotero won't know what to do with):
    Advanced Search:
    Attachment Content -- Does not Contain --- .
    (with the search field set to regexp by clicking on the little arrow on the left)
    Attachment File Type -- is -- PDF
  • bookhand
    Adam - Many thanks for the suggestion. Either I'm getting something wrong, or the fact that all of the files are links to files, rather than imported into the library, is confusing things. Currently, I'm leaving the regexp search field blank. The search still returns results for files that have metadata that Zotero has pulled, which means they definitely don't require OCRing. Thanks, regardless - I'll keep tinkering.
  • bookhand
    I'm still struggling with this. Is there any way to generate a list of items that Zotero has attempted to retrieve metadata for, and returned "No matching references found"? Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    no. Have you tried the period rather than the blank regexp search field? I'm not sure what Zotero would understand a blank field to mean.
  • bookhand
    Adam - My apologies. I'd misread the period as part of the line, rather than the search term. That does indeed return 300 or so items, and though for whatever reason some have been OCRd, or even have valid metadata, it's a more reasonable with which to work.

    It's a shame there's no way to return a list of items that haven't found matching references, but have been searched - in similar situations with many unrecognized files, it's one way of separating out those that need manual data entry vs. hit various snags (not OCRd, Google scholar limits, etc.)

    Thanks again for your assistance.
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