"Subscribe to feed": what does it even mean?

Hi, I have been trying for months to subscribe to https://www.zotero.org/groups/2456014/global_cyber_troops_2020/library (on Mac, Firefox, with a bunch of privacy add-ons in Firefox but I disabled them in case they were bothering Zotero) to no avail. Can you please help me understand this process? The documentation is not helping with this problem. I really just want to import all these citations into my Zotero client so I can tag them myself, and it's not working.

I have clicked the ... button at the top of the table in the browser Zotero client, and seen the "Subscribe to feed" label pop up.

When I click "Subscribe to feed," my browser opens a dialog to download a file labeled only "top", with no extension on it. It is not clear what "top" is supposed to refer to.

When I open that file, it appears to be XML of the library... but maybe not the whole library? It doesn't seem large enough to contain every record (I could be wrong).

This is not what I'd expect. "Subscribe to feed" appears to give me a download of the library, not an option to follow the library. When I select "subscribe to feed" I would expect the group library to show up in my Zotero client on my desktop; it does not.

I tried importing the "top" xml file to the Zotero client, and the client rejects it as "not in a supported format." I don't get why Zotero exports a format it can't recognize as ingestable.

Help?
  • Subscribe to feed subsribes you to an atom feed of the library, which you can use in Zotero or any other Feed reader. It would tell you about new items in the library, not let you import existing one.

    To add all items in the library to yours, use shift+click to select all (or a couple of hundred at a time) and simply drag them over to your library. Note that even if you see the attachment items, you don't actually have access to the attachments (and top level files) in the group, so those won't transfer.
  • aahh that worked! Thank you so much, it has literally been months. Feels like the documentation should perhaps be clearer on what the "subscribe to feed" button does and does not do.
  • @adamsmith I'm generally having some trouble getting Zotero to import files... that .xml one wouldn't work, and I just exported a CSV from Zotero and then obviously it wouldn't import because it doesn't support that format. Any tips?
  • Zotero imports standard bibliographic metadata formats -- Bibtex, RIS, Endnote XML, MARC, MODS, CSL JSON, as well as its own RDF output (I'm probably forgetting a couple).
    CSV is no metadata format (it's just a random table that can hold about anything) and Atom XML isn't designed for bibliographic metadata, so those are just not expected to import.
  • I just stumbled upon the same problem - Firefox downloads the .atom file, which is not really helpful (but might be a bug in Firefox?). It's still possible to get the feed-link from the download, but maybe it would be easier if "Add to Feed" just added the feed to my Zotero-library as long as I'm logged into the web library anyways.

    And another small aside: While figuring this out, I thought joining the public group might do exactly that, which it turned out not to - I now have a pending membership for a group and do not seem to be able to cancel it myself. I realize that this is my mistake for not reading the documentation beforehand, but maybe at least an "Undo" button for people like me would be helpful :)
  • The feed also only seems to retrieve the last 25 items from the group library - is that intentional or am I overlooking something?
Sign In or Register to comment.