Upgrade StoragePrivately hosted library metadata server -- can I avoid using zotero.org?
Hi,
I discovered Zotero quite recently and am very interested in using it in my company (not 'MY' company, just 'my' company, if you see what I mean). I'm part of a small group of researchers (~5) who would like to share a resource repository. The group feature in 2.0 looks ideal, but for one thing: management are uncomfortable with us storing data on servers which we do not control. As I understand it, it is impossible to use the group feature (or sync or privately hosted webdav file storage) without relying on the zotero.org servers to serve regular library items.
My question is this: can we privately host everything we need to provide a shared repository? If so, please provide relevant information. If not, why not? Will we be able to in future versions?
I've scoured the documentation and forums and can't find any discussion of this, though I can't believe that others haven't asked it before -- I apologise if this issue is covered elsewhere.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
I discovered Zotero quite recently and am very interested in using it in my company (not 'MY' company, just 'my' company, if you see what I mean). I'm part of a small group of researchers (~5) who would like to share a resource repository. The group feature in 2.0 looks ideal, but for one thing: management are uncomfortable with us storing data on servers which we do not control. As I understand it, it is impossible to use the group feature (or sync or privately hosted webdav file storage) without relying on the zotero.org servers to serve regular library items.
My question is this: can we privately host everything we need to provide a shared repository? If so, please provide relevant information. If not, why not? Will we be able to in future versions?
I've scoured the documentation and forums and can't find any discussion of this, though I can't believe that others haven't asked it before -- I apologise if this issue is covered elsewhere.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
And no, you're not the first person asking, this has come up repeatedly in the past, but might be a little hard to find in the forum, because everyone might describe this in different terms.
In the meantime, I'll probably look into the feasibility of nightly database merges. I expect this to be painful at best and impossible at worst.
I know it's off topic, but if anyone has any pointers RE merging they would be gladly received. A cursory search suggests that this too has been previously discussed, so at least I've got a starting point.
Alternatively, I'm not sure how something like dropbox would work with a single shared library, but it does have versioning, so it presumably has some kind of ability to handle distributed modification of a single cloud file. Of course, that file is still stored somewhere in dropbox's servers, so I guess that doesn't solve your problem.
If you really do a manual merge, I'm guessing the best way would be export to zotero RDF and then import to the central library, but I don't use RDF much, so don't have much practical experience with the format.
One networked drive sounds risky, because simultaneous usage would create corrupted database.
Merging isn't easy because of the nature of the sqlite database, I haven't seen any promising strategies described here.