Digital Commons repository and Zotero

JoshuaLambertLib
My university uses Digital Commons (from Elsevier) as an institutional repository. I thought in the past that saving a citation via the Zotero browser add-on would pull in the PDF file when I was on a Digital Commons metadata page. But, I may be remembering wrong. Now, all I get is a snapshot of that current page rather than the PDF.

https://bearworks.missouristate.edu/theses/4055/

If I actually click on the "Download" button and am viewing the PDF in the browser, I can use the Zotero save icon when it shows as a PDF and it will download the PDF. The problem with that is that it doesn't download the metadata from the repository.

Has anybody saved the PDFs, via a connector, from a Digital Commons repository in the past? If so, is it still working for you? I'm thinking that this was a change in the Digital Commons platform but I can't remember for sure what the behavior used to be.

Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    It's actually just picking up a poor default. Zotero has long talked about improved behavior on generic imports (like here) and I hope that still happen, but you can also manually improve this:
    - right-click on the "Save to Zotero" button and then
    - select "Save to Zotero (Embedded Metadata)" (the current default is COinS)

    That gets you excellent metadata and the PDF attached.

    (@AbeJellinek -- what's the status of a merged/improved embedded metadata translator? The current status of this isn't ideal; happy to brainstorm on GH if there are remaining conceptual issues)
  • JoshuaLambertLib
    Thanks adamsmith. That does work the way I wanted. I have used Zotero for 15 years and I either have never right clicked the Zotero add-on icon in the browser bar or I long forgot about it. I'm glad to know it now.

    If anyone thinks there used to be different behavior with Digital Commons pages, I would still be interested in your feedback.
  • adamsmith
    I think they may have added COinS on the Digital Commons end, which would change default behavior
  • JoshuaLambertLib
    That would make sense. Digging through the html source shows they are using quite the mix of metadata standards. They include: Open Graph, Schema.org, Elsevier's own standard, COinS, Twitter Cards, and old fashioned HTML meta tags. I guess Zotero would have to choose which one is the priority to pull from.
  • adamsmith
    Zotero throws all of them except COinS together and then prefers COinS. There's a logic to that (sometimes all the other tags are attrocious), but it's not ideal, hence my note for Abe who is the Zotero dev who mainly maintains translators, above.
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