ilmzot

Feed your Zotero knowledge into NotebookLM.

ilmzot mirrors Zotero collections into same-named NotebookLM notebooks while keeping Zotero as the source of truth. It is one-way: local PDFs are uploaded, but Zotero is never modified and disappeared items are not deleted remotely.

Quickstart

ilmzot setup
ilmzot ls
ilmzot sync "Climate Modelling"
ilmzot status

ilmzot setup detects Zotero at localhost:23119, authenticates NotebookLM using browser cookies, and creates its local state directory. Use --browser firefox, --browser "firefox::Work", or --login for interactive authentication. ilmzot supports major browsers through automatic cookie detection. An interactive login fallback is available when browser-cookie extraction is unavailable.

Installation

PyPI and Homebrew releases are coming soon. The intended Homebrew UX is brew install <user>/tap/ilmzot; it will provide ilmzot directly without shell configuration. For local development:

git clone <repository-url>
cd ilmzot
uv sync
uv run ilmzot --help

Python 3.10–3.12 is supported (browser-cookie support is most reliable on 3.12). Runtime authentication is provided by notebooklm-py[cookies].

Commands

ilmzot sync --all syncs the personal library to Zotero Library. -n/--notebook changes the destination name and -d/--dry-run previews work. ilmzot doctor is diagnostic-only and explains one concrete fix for failures.

Architecture and state

The standard library handles CLI parsing, HTTP, hashing, and state. zotero.py owns the local Zotero API, notebook.py contains the unofficial NotebookLM boundary, and state.py stores SHA-256 mappings. State is $XDG_DATA_HOME/ilmzot/state.json, or ~/.local/share/ilmzot/state.json. It contains no cookies, tokens, passwords, or browser credentials.

Privacy and limitations

PDFs are read locally from Zotero and uploaded to NotebookLM. No Zotero cloud API key is needed. Group libraries, bidirectional sync, metadata editing, and destructive remote reconciliation are not supported in 0.1.0.

NotebookLM integration relies on an unofficial API exposed through notebooklm-py and may require updates when Google changes NotebookLM. ilmzot is not affiliated with Zotero or Google.