How to set up Zotero export capabilities for an academic bibliography website?

The online bibliography of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature is an important resource in my field:
http://orion-bibliography.huji.ac.il/
I asked the Center about export capabilities to Zotero, and they are interested in the prospect, but unfamiliar with Zotero. So I am posting this query on their behalf: what would a Zotero user need to do to crawl the website (if it is currently possible)? If this is not possible, what would need to happen in order to make it possible?
  • edited December 29, 2015
    Please be more specific in your request.

    Are you asking how the Center can reveal item metadata so that it may be imported into Zotero?

    Are you asking how you or others can develop a site translator so that the site's existing pages (without additional metadata modifications) can be brought into Zotero?

    I know of no database that encourages its users to crawl the site and capture the contents for other use such as the creation of another database. Perhaps, you intended something other than the accepted meaning of a website crawl.

    I see that the Center's database draws its contents from many publishers. It is certainly the case that the Center has formal agreements with those publishers that limit what may be done with the publishers' or authors' intellectual property. I know that in the case of my online literature database this means annually renewing license agreements with hundreds of publishers -- large and small.

    One of the Zotero experts will be able to answer your question if you better explain what you desire.
  • Thanks for your response. I can tell you what I am looking for: I want to be able to export the citations from Orion into my Zotero library. Not the articles, just the full publication information.
    I guess that sounds like a "site translator".
    I am not sure if this is what the website managers had in mind as well, or if they meant something else.
  • edited December 29, 2015
    I set-up metadata availability in the headers of each record of the SafetyLit database and am willing to correspond by email with Center staff about the experience. This was a simple task for my website developers. It required only a few hours of work.

    To see what this means go to SafetyLit.org, find any journal article, view the record page, and then view the source html for the webpage. All of the meta-tag bibliography stuff you see is generated "on the fly" for each page. Also note that we also added tags for Google Scholar at their request.

    Article lists and each record in the list is available by clicking the appropriate Zotero icon.
  • SafteyLit is indeed a good example. It's at http://www.safetylit.org/ and uses unAPI, which would indeed be the recommended way of serving high-quality data to Zotero.

    COinS would probably be the next-best option (SafetyLit also implements that--doing one doesn't preclude the other) and has the added benefit that it works with several other reference managers such as Mendeley, but the quality of data is a good bit lower.
  • Feel free to submit that translator as a pull request to http://github.com/zotero/translators
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