Lookup engine hosting

[Erik Hetzner]

Hi all,

I was looking for a quick way to lookup items in my local public
libraries (which are not members of worldcat) [1], and Dan was helpful
enough to point me at Zotero’s lookup engines [2]. Lookup engines seem
to be an underutilized feature of Zotero. I had not realized that
lookup was so flexible!

Using the data from Bookburrito [3] I have generated thousands of
lookup engines for libraries and bookstores [4]. For the moment I am
hosting these here:

http://www.e6h.org/tmp/engines/index.html

But obviously it would be great if Zotero could host them in some way.

I am also looking for advice as to how best to generate and display
these. Right now I am using a simple Ruby script to generate the
necessary files and the results are not very pretty or intuitive. You
can see example input data here [5] and the build script is in the
repo [4].

Thanks for any help you can provide!

best, Erik

1. https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/38548/requesting-books-from-a-local-library/
2. https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/creating_locate_engines_using_opensearch
3. http://bookburrito.org/
4. https://github.com/egh/zotero-lookup-engines
5. https://github.com/egh/zotero-lookup-engines/blob/master/engines_json/us.ca.san_francisco_public_library.json

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[Aurimas Vinckevicius]

Related:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/29931/add-attachmen-add-an-action/
https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/336

IMO, anyone can host a collection of lookup engines that they find useful on whatever website they choose (e.g. blog). While Zotero could allow hosting some engines on the wiki, I can see that list growing out of control and getting outdated, so I don't think it's a good idea.

There are certainly some improvements to be made in terms of managing lookup engines though and hopefully the pull request I link above will eventually evolve into something better (feel free to improve on it, or submit something better altogether). I think we could also make it possible to add lookup engines via connectors to make the whole process more fluid.

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[Erik Hetzner]

Hi Aurimas,

Thanks for the info. I agree that managing lookup engines it pretty
awkward - I usually use “tab mode” so the menu option to add a lookup
engine is not available for me.

If you have a look at the github repo you’ll see that the definitions
are just JSON data. This makes keeping them up to date a little
easier, since the HTML and XML are generated from a template.

I think it would be nice if Zotero were to maintain lookup engines in
the same way that they maintain CSL styles and translators.

best, Erik

At Tue, 22 Jul 2014 00:11:34 -0500,

[Aurimas Vinckevicius]

Zotero doesn't maintain CSL styles (that's a separate project). Similarly, this could be how lookup engines are maintained. What you have now (a github repo) is probably not a bad way to do it and I can see it evolving along with Zotero to expand this, as you say, underutilized feature.

Though something to keep in mind is that there's a lot of versatility in building OpenURL queries and different users may want to utilize different metadata for their lookups. I'm not sure how customizable you want to make this or how well Zotero could support things like "use ISBN if available, but fall back to title/author otherwise" (as opposed to searching using ISBN, author, and title, which may be undesirable). It's been a while since I looked into this, but there's certainly a lot of potential here.