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New Website Features: Zotero Reference Assist

Creators: Tom Elliott Copyright © The Contributors. Sharing and remixing permitted under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (cc-by).
Last modified Apr 10, 2024 05:59 PM
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A software development iteration in February 2024 with our long-time contractor, Jazkarta, Inc. has introduced some new features for users of the Pleiades website. This post introduces enhancements that assist content contributors in creating and modifying bibliographic references by leveraging the Zotero citation management system and its web application programming interface.
New Website Features: Zotero Reference Assist

Pleiades has always contained bibliographic references, but our tools and techniques for managing them have changed over time. When we began prototyping in 2006, we used imported, plain text citations from the Barrington Atlas Map-by-Map Directory compilation materials in the Pleiades database, supplemented with additional, manual entry fields for external links and identifiers. Content editing and verification was supported by an offline, bespoke Microsoft Access database of work-level data (both monographic and analytic) for many of the works cited. The latter was eventually serialized to HTML web pages, providing web users with full work citation information for the short references held in the Pleiades resources.

The contents of the Access database, as well as works that had been subsequently added directly to the Pleiades database through the web application, were migrated to a Zotero group library beginning in 2009. The online forms used by contributors were updated so that standard citations, short titles, and web links could be auto-fetched via the Zotero API after manually entering a URI for the corresponding Zotero record. We have been engaged in the process of regularizing and aligning the legacy references in the Pleiades database to the corresponding Zotero records since that time.

In October 2023, we piloted a new feature on references for place resources aimed at sparing our contributors the requirement to find and copy manually the Zotero URI for each bibliographic item in order to import data for a reference. A "quick lookup" mechanism, drawing on a reference list built into the Pleiades application, provides a fast way to add a Zotero URI to a reference based after entering a short title of a frequently cited works. For works not in the "frequently cited" list, character strings in the author name, work title, and date fields can be searched via the Zotero API, providing the user a list of the query results from which they can "point and click" to enter the Zotero URI. Once the Zotero URI is in place, the existing API fetch behaviors perform as they have since the initial Zotero integration.

The pilot functionality, with refinements for usability and performance, was extended to all types of Pleiades resources (places, names, locations, and connections) at the end of Feburary 2024. Our contributing users now have a quick and reliable way to construct (and renovate) references, relying on the Zotero library for authority control of short titles, work-level citations, and work-level web links.

A step-by-step guide to using the new functionality may be found in our Help documents section, under Adding Data to Pleiades -> How to add a new reference.