The upcoming legal bibliography project is coming up for submission to the committee, and so far we have a very sparse set of details about what's required; there's a jumble of suggested technologies and no clear path for integrating them. In the ongoing absence of detail, we looked this morning at one aspect of the project that we can consider: finding out whether an item has been submitted previously or not, based on fuzzy matching. We looked at the possibility of using NCD for this, and it seems practical in PHP, which has lots of useful compression algorithms; we looked in vain for a decent working implementation of any compression algorithm in JavaScript, so it doesn't seem that it would be practical to do this in JS. However, we also note that Zotero already has duplicated detection working "internally", and it will presumably be available soon, so perhaps this is not a good use of our time.

It seems to me that the entire functionality that's required could be implemented with a collective centralized Zotero bibliography -- one closed group and one open group project, so anyone could submit to the open group, and managers could then move data to the closed group.