Synchronisation with Zotero

/biblio/manager — Advanced users and Administrators only.

1. The principle

Zotero is the source; DAPCA is the reflection. Every bibliographic correction — a misspelled author, a wrong year, a record to be added — is made in the Zotero library, and synchronisation brings it in. There is no bibliographic editing anywhere in the public interface, by design: two editable copies of the same library would diverge within a week.

2. What a synchronisation does

It compares the library with what DAPCA holds and reports the outcome in four groups:

• new — records added to the library since the last run;
• modified — records whose data has changed;
• deleted — records removed from the library and removed here too;
• protected — records removed from the library but kept here, see below.

Collections are aligned along with the records, so a rearrangement of the Zotero collections is reflected in the collection filter.

3. 🔴 Records with dependencies are never deleted

A record deleted in Zotero is not deleted from DAPCA if anything in the corpus cites it — a tablet reference, an annotation, a seal. It is listed among the protected items with a warning, and left in place.

This is a deliberate safety net: a clean-up of the library cannot empty the corpus's apparatus. But it also means the two are now out of step, and the divergence is yours to resolve:

• if the deletion was intended, detach the citations first (from the tablet, the annotation or the seal), then run the synchronisation again — with no dependencies left, the record is removed;
• if it was not, restore the record in Zotero.

Leaving it protected indefinitely is also a legitimate choice: the apparatus keeps working, at the cost of a record that exists here and not in the library.

4. The other two operations

Verify integrity compares the two sides and reports the differences without writing anything. Run it when you want to know what a synchronisation would do before doing it.

Clean up orphans removes records that are no longer in Zotero and have no dependencies. It applies the same protection as above, so it can only remove what nothing cites.

5. Reading the statistics

The page shows the total number of records, the distribution by type, the date of the last update, and the twenty most recently created and modified records. They are there to answer one question after a run — did it do what I expected? — and the two "latest" lists are the quickest way to check that a batch of new titles actually arrived.