collaboration feature

ftr
I would like to get a collaboration features. We are a Europe-wide research group and would like to use a free Internet biblio that allows to create a cumulative and collective biblio data base. If I understand well today if you want to share Zotero data bases you have to export the info and send it to the other members of your network who will then import it. This sounds akward and ripe for errors. Or do I miss something, an eventual work around already working?

- Frank
  • bdarcus
    Yes, you miss something. The Zotero team has been saying for the past year that social networking and collaboration features are coming in 2.0.
  • scot
    Until then, you're right. Real collaboration of the kind you describe is not possible with Zotero. You could, I suppose have a single database online somewhere, which each person 'checks out' to edit, then replaces. (Just copy the /zotero directory in your Firefox profile.) But you'd have to (1) keep everyone's installation of Zotero up to date. (Make sure they were always updated automatically) (2) not save or replace the database with firefox running . (3) backup the data, and keep old backups in case something gets corrupted, (4) have a reasonably technical set of users, who understood the troubles. The database can't be edited concurrently, nor can databases be merged, so if one gets out of sync, you'd have to manually export the new entries and merge them into the trunk.

    It's not impossible, (it's an extension of what some of us do already who keep our Zotero database in sync over multiple machines via a flash drive), but it might not be wise. It's much easer for a single user to avoid messing things up. (Also, such tricks are, I think they say, 'unsupported'.)
  • ftr
    Thanks, bdarcus & Scot for the comments. The current procedure is clearly not one I shall push the community to use, in a community whose members are in general no techno geeks and who have no fun in tweaking around.

    I have not tried it out but would an import of the locally created Zoteros files into a central Zotero data base help? In a second step every participant would have to replace his/her outdated local by the new central version. There are several import formats. Which data base format among those listed would be the best when you want to add other Zotero files to your existing data base ?

    Or is this just another error-prone idea? Maybe we should drop the idea of creating a collaborative data base with Zotero.

    Any better idea ?

    - Frank
  • scot
    edited October 22, 2007
    I can't comment on whether it's an error-prone idea or not, sorry. I think that Zotero's import and export of its own RDF is pretty robust, but I haven't played with it. Perhaps someone else can comment. Note that at the moment Zotero doesn't have duplicate detection, (It will happily merge 12 slightly different databases into one, with most of the records duplicated 12x!) You would have to have people export only their new work (relatively easy to find, since you can sort by "Modified date"), and have a manager merge each new collection into a database sitting somewhere publicly reachable.\

    You'd be working in "no promises" territory, but it might work. I suppose the question is: Can you make it easy enough for the users to: (1) export new work after adding it (2) backup their local database so they don't clobber it if there is trouble, and (3) replace their local database with the upstream one, not forgetting to keep firefox setup to always update to the nearest Zotero version, so you don't get new database versions on old Zotero releases. There are online bibliographic projects which might be more suitable at this point.
  • ftr
    You think of which online bibliographic projects ?
  • freddy7
    Hi folks,

    I also would be happy to get a multiple users version of Zotero. We would like to create a common database, that any user could enhance.

    For that kind of use, Bibus suggests using a MySQL database, that would allow multiple access to the same database from multiple users. Do you have an idea if that would be possible in Zotero 2.0 version, and when that release would be available ?

    thanks in advance,

    Frederic.
  • amandafrench
    I third the motion. I'd really like to be able to create, annotate, and publish a bibliography collaboratively.
  • adamsmith
    as I understand the upcoming version 1.5 that already exists in preview allows that - if you all share one Zotero account for a project you can sync your files over a central server - including of course annotations.
    The full scope of the, shall we say, web 2.0 features of zotero will, aproapriately perhaps, be released with Zotero 2.0.
  • kbares
    Can anyone point me to Zotero's "official" plans for its next major releases? Like another in this thread, I am interested in using Zotero to support a group of 5-10 researchers. What I've seen so far from using the system is very exciting. I've also seen posts that say one can share an account (including the WebDav server), and I've done this with two computers at the same time, with a limited amount of testing and no problem. My questions come down to (1) for the foreseeable future, is it a bad idea to share an account between several colleagues (e.g., is this recipe for disaster in that our database may be lost or otherwise corrupted)?; and (2) if we invest a lot of time and energy into developing our shared database, it is likely that the database will be easily adapted to work within a collaborative, next-generation Zotero?
  • Tjowens
    Groups are in the works. See http://www.zotero.org/support/development_roadmap
  • kbares
    Thanks!
  • kmp
    It will be good if there is a function connecting university library and database and downloading their record (like Endnote).
  • noksagt
    It will be good if there is a function connecting university library and database and downloading their record (like Endnote).
    This is off-topic to this thread. However, you should be able to go to your library catalog in firefox & do exactly that. Search for a thread that is on this topic or start a new thread on it if you can't find one if you need more help.
  • danwoodard
    edited April 2, 2010
    There are various ways to permit collaboration, and it deserves thinking about what strategy miight be most effective. Whether the document is edited simultaneously or sequentially, where should the citation database be stored? I wonder if the most logical answer could be within the document itself? Why not embed a database of the references actually used in the document as a hidden RDF file or XML field? Another author could then open it as a folder in the zotero library list when he/she opens the document. When any author adds a reference, it would be copied (without extra files) into the zotero library within the document, and thus be editable by any other author. This would reduce the confusion about which zotero database to sync to, and eliminate worries about accidentally deleting all the citation entries by editing the document with an incompatible library open.

    If this approach were possible, then the paper itself could be edited directly in xml, i.e. on google wave or another collaborative web-based editor. With an appropriate plugin, Firefox could handle web-based editing as well as bibliography management.
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