Upgrade Storagetags and collections best practice ?
Hi,
Where may I find guides or tips or "best practices" about the use of tags and collections ?
Are there plans on new features for tags ? For example a kind of multilevel tags (similar to the subcollections)?
Where may I find guides or tips or "best practices" about the use of tags and collections ?
Are there plans on new features for tags ? For example a kind of multilevel tags (similar to the subcollections)?
If I were to describe my rules of thumb they would be maximize tags and minimize sub-collections. And make full use of Saved Searches.
Tags are most powerful and easy to exploit if you derive most of your tag list *before* you start collecting references (or as early as possible in that process). It is hard to make wholesale changes to tags once you have a large library, if those changes will require finding a lot of items that need tag changes. Your tags may evolve, but in general it's probably better to have a little too much detail in your tag system than not enough. I don't worry too much about redundancy in my tags. I can always search for several tags that I know might be relevant. It's easy to combine redundant tags later (in the left tag pane, just rename the one you don't want to the same name as the one you do).
It requires discipline to assign tags to each new item (as soon as possible after you add the item). But the payback when you can pull a pile of relevant tagged items from your library when you need them is great.
Hierarchical tags would be great, but are not currently available in Zotero (they are in at least one plugin).
I try to minimize the creation of new sub-collections (collection bloat is a problem that a lot of people fall into, which can be hard to come back from). And I never have items in a sub-collection that are not also in a top-level 'domain' collection. That way I can delete or archive sub-collections that have outlived their utility, without worrying that there might be items whose overall categorization will be lost if I delete the sub-collection. I have View\Show Items from Subcollections set to OFF.