Request: Newspapers.com plug-in or compatibility.

magnoliasouth
Hi all. More and more people are beginning to use Newspapers.com for research on topics, rather than it's original purpose of genealogy. It has never worked well with Zotero but they have recently reformatted their site. Though I know little about coding, I do know that it most likely would be rather easy to fix now because most of the necessary information is in the second bar from the top.

Is anyone interested in creating a fix for this? I would be SO VERY grateful. You have no idea. I use that site nearly every single day for research and would love it if someone could take a stab at it.
  • dstillman
    edited August 2, 2021
    Zotero has had a translator for Newspapers.com for four years, and the translator was updated as recently as a couple months ago.

    If something isn't working, we'd need an example URL and a description of the problem.
  • magnoliasouth
    edited August 3, 2021
    Okay, I tried again and it's the same. I think part of the problem is that it defaults to a Webpage instead of a Newspaper article, which I'll explain in further detail in a moment. For example, this is the Zotero title:

    6 Sep 1939, 1 - Evening Standard at Newspapers.com

    Which isn't a title. The Newspaper name is Evening Standard. The date is 6 Sep 1939 and it is page 1 (hence the date comma 1) of the newspaper. The newspaper archive should be Newspapers.com and the URL would still be where the URL should go.

    The actual title and author would be nearly impossible to extract which is understandable since it would need to be highlighted and have OCR to read the highlighted portion.

    This is a paid subscription site, but the URL for this example is: https://www.newspapers.com/image/720806577

    Just fixing those alone would save me a BUNCH of time.

    Thanks so much for helping!
  • dstillman
    Just to clarify, you can hover over the save button to see what translator is being used. You'll see that it's just showing Embedded Metadata, which is a generic translator that triggers on most sites. Everything else you're describing is just a consequence of the Newspapers.com translator not actually detecting the page you're on. No need to list all the details when something like this happens.

    But this is by design. The site prefers that people save from clippings, not images. Details here.
  • AbeJellinek
    To be specific, if you'd like to save an article, click the "Clip" button in the Newspapers.com toolbar and drag a box around the article that you want. When you're on a page like this, the translator will offer to save for you.

    There's no good way to save an entire page of a paper, unfortunately. I could have it create an item with a dummy article title but the correct page/date, but I think that would just be more confusing.
  • edmundrussell
    Zotero is no longer saving clippings from Newspapers.com the way it did. In the past, I clipped an article in Newspapers.com, viewed the clipping, and clicked on the Save to Zotero icon in Firefox. The item was saved in Zotero as a Newspaper Article, and a pdf of the clipping was attached. That changed in the past couple weeks. Now, Zotero saves just metadata (Embedded Metadata is what the save icon says when I hover), so it saves in Zotero as a Web Page, has no pdf attached, and has a link to the clipping in Newspapers.com. An example of the kind of clipping is here https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-times-picayune-telegraphed-to-the-ne/120087578/ How do I get it to return to its old habits? Thanks for your help.
  • AbeJellinek
    @edmundrussell: On it - thanks for reporting this. Should have an update out soon.
  • AbeJellinek
    OK, pushed an update. Your Zotero Connector should auto-update within 24 hours, or you can update manually by clicking Update Translators in the Advanced pane of the Zotero Connector preferences.
  • edmundrussell
    That works well. Thank you so much.
  • AbeJellinek
    No problem!
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