item templates

bagehot
I import a lot of working papers from one particular "repository." (NBER) They come in as item type Journal Articles. I change the item type to Report and fill in the following fields: Series Title (= Working Paper Series), Place (= Cambridge, MA), and Institution (= National Bureau of Economic Research). The content of these fields is common to all items from this source. I would like to avoid having to enter these manually every time. I would import an item from this source, then click on something that would make it a report item with these fields already filled in appropriately. I would still have to manually enter the title, report number and date, but it would be a big help if I could automate these three fields.

Is there any way to do this? I've searched KB and this forum and have not been able to find anything. Thanks in advance!
  • cinnamingirl
    I have a similar issue, and also wasn't able to find anything, so hopefully someone can chime in.

    My use case is that I'd like to be able to specify what item type is set for a given URL, or at the very least, be able to update multiple item types at once. For example, I save a lot of blog pages, but they always get marked as web page. I'd like to be able to specify somewhere, if something is from a particular domain (tumblr.com, blogspot.com) that it's always marked as a Blog Post item type, instead of needing to change tens or hundreds of documents one-by-one.
  • adamsmith
    @bagehot -- how are you adding these? NBER papers should import as preprints with most of that information, except place of publication, filled out. Beyond that, you can use Zutilo to copy item field in batch.

    @cinnamingirl I don't think that's possible without fairly significant coding (technically: writing custom translators for those site).
  • bagehot
    I get NBER papers from them by email, one at a time I download them to my hard drive, and “copy” them to “My Library” in zotero via clock and drag. That results in “Journal article” item type, without the right title or much else. If there’s another way to import NBER working papers that yields more convenient results, I’d love to know about it.

    I was unable to add zutilo when I tried.
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