I have some translators ready

bill
I have some basic translators for the the following:

Law Reviews
* HeinOnline

Laws/Statutes/Regulations
* U.S. Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (e-CFR)

Legal Information Institutes
* Australasian and New Zealand Legal Information Institute
* British and Irish Legal Information Institute
* Canadian Legal Information Institute
* Cornell's Legal Information Institute

U.S. Patents
* USPTO

For those who want to experiment and improve them, the source is available here: http://code.google.com/p/zotero-for-lawyers/

For users (Windows) who just want to install them: http://zotero-for-lawyers.googlecode.com/files/zotero-for-lawyers-win32-installer.exe
  • sean
    If these translators are ready for primetime, we are happy to add them to the general Zotero repository. Please let us know.
  • bill
    yes, please add them
  • sean
    Your translators are now available. Zotero should update to the new translators automatically within 24 hours. You can update manually by going to the Preferences under the Actions (gear) menu and clicking "Update Now".
  • moritzes
    Bill- Thanks for the translators! Hein Online is an especially good one for me (law professor). Any chance you'll take a crack at Lexis/Nexis (the law site, not the general academic site, already "scraped" by Zotero) and Westlaw?
    -Stewart
  • bill
    Hi Stewart,

    I'd love to take a crack at L/N and Westlaw. Unfortunately, I don't have active accounts. I last practiced law in 1995 and have been a programmer in Cambridge MA since then.

    I was recently able to get a reasonably priced student membership to the Social Law Library in Boston since I'm enrolled in a MLIS program. This allows me to use HeinOnline, FastCase, InfoTrac and some other services remotely. I still need to take a trip to the library in order to use Westlaw. So, I'm planning to try to add Westlaw sometime this summer (probably in July).

    Forward any feedback you might have on the HeinOnline translator - you are my target audience.
  • mdelcarlo
    edited June 20, 2007
    Thank you for posting the USPTO translator. Unfortunately it doesn't extract the abstract properly, which leaves that field blank in the exported citation.
  • bill
    Unfortunately, translators are based on "screen-scraping" techniques and are, therefore, fragile. If you post a link to the patent in question, I might be able to fix it and update the translator.
  • bill
    Looks like Zotero's field name for abstract recently changed from "abstract" to "abstractNote." I'll update relevant translators and give Sean a shout when I'm done.
  • sean
    I've already gone ahead and updated the HeinOnline and USPTO translators accordingly. They'll be available later today.
  • mdelcarlo
    Fantastic! Zotero's patent citation functionality is an extremely valuable resource. Look at EndNote, it's a couple hundred dollars for something that will search just about every university library in the country but curiously can't generate a single patent citation. In fact, they did that on purpose because the same company owns Delphion. I'm a professor and my department gives them thousands of dollars every year for access to freely available information. All they do is parse out a couple more things like the claims, specification, and forward & reverse citations. Hardly seems worth all that money. Anyway, well done Zotero!
  • Cassandra2323
    What is the status of these translators? I can;t download them, and can't seem to get Zotero to work with Lexis, WestLaw or HeinonLine

    Thanks!
  • maztec
    bill: Are you still interested in working on Lexis and WestLaw translators?
  • fbennett
    Hi maztec,

    I have built a translator for the Lexis collection, "US & Canadian Law Reviews Combined". It only works on that specific collection (Lexis does not provide structured metadata, so we have to do some fairly wild stuff with screen scraping to extract the citation from the text, which is closely tied to the formatting conventions of their journal article document layout). You can find that translator on zotero-dev. It works fine with 2.0 beta.

    I don't have Westlaw access, so I can't help there.
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