yeah, so I try to use Zotero for my reading workflow. I capture to it and I have had various third-party tools looking at the associated Zotero server Atom feed. Presently Networked Blogs, which pushes a citation (of the Zotero record, not the work cited) to both my twitter and facebook accounts. When it works. But I’m missing pieces I’d like to have, like pushing offline copies to my Kindle, my email, other reading contexts. I played around with IFTTT last week; but couldn’t invest more than a couple hours and it was clear that custom code would be needed.

And it’s hard to resist making the Zotero records rich at the moment of capture. Which often they aren’t, because translator and metadata support is pretty spotty across what I read, apparently.

DHCommons, newly out, does not seem to be on the Zotero metadata bandwagon

@paregorios: It sounds like you’re looking for something like zotfile + dropbox but for all formats, not just pdfs. It’s an interesting idea. I’m curious, though, if you want to keep everything you’ve read for citation later? Why not use something like Pocket for reading across formats and devices?

@roxanne: I have in fact been experimenting with pocket, but I’m not always sure what I’ll want to cite and not. So I’d like to have everything (including the pocket or whatever bit) work together.

Just yesterday afternoon I was experimenting with Zapier (an IFTTT competitor) and had good luck using it to trigger on changes in a Zotero Atom feed and push new content into the #geospatial channel, so I’ll be looking at using another “zap” maybe to bridge Zotero and Pocket.

@paregorios: Do you find Zotero sufficient for searching through your reading record?

@fmcc: it’s really pretty good; my major frustration with it is the limited data model; it’s missing lots of useful types and won’t let you deploy the full suite of fields across all types.

but that latter complaint is more about my other uses of it, not my reading stream

@paregorios: I’ve been meaning to start using zotero to record everything i’m reading as well, but I really want it to more easily find e.g. a half-remembered article on functional programming in python that I read a few months back

right. I sometimes have the same use case. Usually I’m able to search through my “reading” collection and find what I’m looking for without too much trouble, but I’ve also been stymied because terms arising from half-remembering weren’t anywhere in the record.

I’m not sure what kind of interaction would help with that tho.

yeah, totally - over time those half remembered articles always transmogrify into the font of all knowledge on the subject

and then disappointment when I find them again

though the Zotero record is just the record that the site makes available right?

you would really would want some sort of full text indexing to search for the half-remembered stuff

You can of course modify the bibliographic content added to Zotero, to include adding “tags” (keywords and phrases). And when citing a webpage, Zotero by default grabs a local copy of the page. That saved me when the guy who wrote the best blog post on the “always deployable github workflow” rearchitected his blogging and tossed all his old content.

I’ll have to experiment to see if the full text content of those “snapshots” gets searched or not. I know there’s tooling in Zotero (or around it in some plugin or other) for indexing the full text of PDFs attached to records, but I haven’t played with that either.

So it looks like I may have achieved my reading/citation workflow dreams. Using a python script, I pull content from one of my Zotero library collections. That same script parses some of the data I get from Zotero and constructs an Atom feed and saves it to Dropbox. I’ve set up apps on http://zapier.com that periodically check that feed and trigger pushes to my Facebook, Twitter, and Pocket accounts when a new entry is present. I have to turn hard-coded account and location details in the script into parameters, but then I’ll publish the script on GitHub.

https://github.com/paregorios/zotnozzle

http://andrew.pilsch.com/blog/2015/10/28/proposal-for-creating-free-online-peer-reviewed-journals/

I had a moment of terror there with PDF featuring so prominently in his inspiration piece, but I see at least he imagines also HTML. FWIW, modern tools to produce dead-tree facsimiles.

Anyone here interested in reviving interest/work in BibJSON? http://okfnlabs.org/bibjson/

See also: http://openbiblio.net/