Oxford DNB not working?

Dead1nside
Hello,

I'm not sure if this is meant to be supported, but on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Zotero places an item in the location bar to enable saving to Zotero using DOI, however it just fails when clicked. Is this known? Any way I can help?

Thank you.
  • adamsmith
    post a sample URL here - if you copy and paste a URL into the "add by identifier" window (magic wand) does that work?
  • ajlyon
    The DOI detection isn't perfect -- at one point, it was detecting the Ubuntu default search page in Firefox, since it found 10.10, the version number. So this could be an erroneous detection on Zotero's part. But if there really was a DOI on the page, paste it here and we'll check it out.
  • Dead1nside
    edited November 28, 2010
    Thanks for the replies.

    As I said it was the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the presence of the icon in the location bar led me to believe that it might be supported.

    The URL I was using is: http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy01.rhul.ac.uk/view/article/17902

    Pasting that same URL into the 'Add item by identifier' does nothing.

    So I was unsure if the intention was that Oxford DNB was supported, and in that case, I was reporting that it was malfunctioning for me. Perhaps an abnormal thing is that I have a proxy in the URL.

    Thanks again.

    Edit: Sorry, I just had to look up what DOI actually meant, as I was getting the impression from your replies that I was missing something.

    At the bottom of the URL given there is indeed a DOI: doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/17902
    When I paste that into the manual identifier, it again complains about being unable to find a record.
  • adamsmith
    that's the problem then - there is no dedicated Oxford DNB translator and the DOI isn't linked to an entry in the CrossRef database (at least not the one for remore lookup like Zotero).
    Nothing really you can do - if you want to, you can send the providers of Oxford DNB a link to this:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/make_your_site_zotero_ready
    the alternative would be to find someone to write a dedicated translator.
  • Simon
    It looks like there's an entry in CrossRef, but, while it contains the full metadata for the dictionary, it doesn't contain any information about the dictionary entry besides the URL. Zotero is looking for a title for the entry and failing to find one. We could tweak the DOI translator to handle this, but I'm not sure if it's worthwhile.
  • ajlyon
    Simon is referring to the CrossRef data at this address: http://www.crossref.org/openurl/?pid=zter:zter321&url_ver=Z39.88-2004&req_dat=usr:pwd&rft_id=info:doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/17902&format=unixref&redirect=false

    If Oxford registered more complete metadata with CrossRef, then we could save a dictionary entry from this DOI, but as Simon points out, the current data provided is only for the dictionary as a whole, plus the "sequence number" of ref:odnb/17902. I'm sure that's not what you want in your Zotero library. Feel free to point this out to Oxford tech support-- perhaps they don't realize that their DOI registrations are so deficient. If they have questions, feel free to point them to this thread in the forums or to zotero-dev; while we are no replacement for CrossRef's own tech support, I'd be glad to explain why it's important to register quality data in the CrossRef database.
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