importing group library

arggem
I have a public group that has about 390 items. It's aimed at entry level "academics." It's a fairly extensive bibliography aimed at undergrads and grad students we need access to a topic they may not be familiar with. It's intentionally designed so that they can search by metadata and tags to find sources of interest, without needing to install a local client.

But, obviously, we are encouraging them to do so, and to import the library, but IIRC only 25 items can be imported at a time, correct?

If that is not the case, please let me know how they can import all 390 items at once.

Otherwise, is the best option for me to export the library from the client and just post the file online for them to download? (Is Zotero RDF the best format?)

Any other suggestions are welcome!
  • adamsmith
    If they have Zotero installed, couldn't they just join the group? (Remember you don't have to allow regular group members to edit/add anything in a group).
  • arggem
    Duh...uh...yeah.

    Thanks!
  • samanthamairson
    If they join the group, is there a way for the student user to import the group items to their personal cloud-based library (-- without downloading the software / standalone)?
  • adamsmith
    not without downloading the software, no.
  • samanthamairson
    Such speedy response! I am impressed. I found the answer in another forum; sorry to make you repeat it but thank you for confirming.

    And there is no way to export more than 25 items from the online group library?
  • DWL-SDCA
    I believe that you can by going to the next pages. But you may know that and mean 25 items at a time. Sadly, that is the limit.
  • adamsmith
    depends on the definition of "no way" -- you can export up to 100 via API (and you can do so with a single URL, i.e. you can all do that in your browser), so it depends on what level of ease of usage you're looking for.
    https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/web_api/v3/basics
  • tzybura
    I’ll post here because it seems to fit. If you’d rather have a new thread, please say so and I’ll open one.

    I would like to request inclusion of

    a) an export option for _all_ items in a group library instead of just the ones that are checked (limited to 25 currently), and

    b) an increase of that limit per page (ideally in the form of options 25/50/100/all).

    Joining the group is a solution only for people who use zotero _and_ have an account here at the website. That’s pretty restrictive for many real life uses of group libraries, I think.

    I tried to use the web API via browser URL, but e.g. <https://api.zotero.org/groups/[groupID]/items/top?format=bibtex>; only exports 25 items. I couldn’t find out how to specify a range of items to increase this to 100 items, as Adam said was possible, but even if I did find out -- 100 items is still too few.
  • dstillman
    https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/web_api/v3/basics#sorting_and_pagination

    The problem with supporting export of arbitrary library sizes without pagination is that it doesn't scale — someone could try to export a 100,000-item library, which would use huge amount of server resources in an unpredictable fashion. That's why it's left up to a client (meaning Zotero or another API client) to make multiple requests — backing off for load balancing if the API instructs it to — and process them locally.

    It's not impossible that we could have some sort of asynchronous server-side processing queue for exports if there were sufficient demand for this, but that's actually how classic sync works, and we've written an entirely new API-based syncing architecture to get away from that in Zotero 5.0. (The only reason this would be a little different is that it would be more infrequent and real-time performance wouldn't be as important, but clients would have to be willing to put up with a delay of potentially many minutes while processing was run.)
  • smteinturs
    Hi everyone,
    I need to use Heurist Database (http://heurist.sydney.edu.au/) which allows to import a Zotero library.
    But I have 480 items, and in Heurist, it appears only 98.
    If I had understood well, there is no way for the moment to import more that 100 items from a Zotero library group ? Or is there a way to import all items ?

    Thanks for your help.
  • adamsmith
    you'd have to ask the Heurist people. Zotero's API certainly allows for syncing all items to another service. With Zotero installed, you can also export the full library (that's just not possible online in a single operation).
  • smteinturs
    Thanks a lot, @adamsmith, for your quick answer, as usual. I'll see with the Heurist team...
  • ian.johnson
    Thanks Sara, we're looking into it. Ian
  • ian.johnson
    The bug, in an external library, has been fixed.

    However some records may not be imported because they are not in our standard list of bibliographic types (about a dozen records in your case). In that case the types need to be added to the database and also to the Zotero record type mapping in zoteroMap.xml (a job for the server admin, us in this case). We have added a more prominent warning and explanation, which will be in our next update (within about a week).
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