Hide material from collection fromthe library

circeus

As soon as you have a few collections, your library quickly becomes so large as to be useless for independent references. If something is put in a sub-collection directly, it does not appear in the parent collection unless copy-pasted there.

Those are entirely opposite behaviors that should be easy to adjust with a "show in parent" option on each collection. Tags can theoretically perform that duty, but it's pointless to add an extra layer of data for something that represent a different organisation.

dstillman

There's a hidden pref, extensions.zotero.recursiveCollections, accessible by going to about:config in the URL bar. It'll make items in subcollections show up in the parent. We don't test with that mode, but a number of people use it.

There's no way to hide items from the Library, and there likely won't ever be. (For a similar system, see iTunes.)

circeus

So basically I'm stuck with no simple way to know whether I'm deleting an item from the library or a collection?

dstillman

Hitting Delete (or Backspace) on an item in a collection removes the item from the collection without removing it from the Library.

Hitting Delete on an item in the Library pops up a delete confirmation dialog and then, if the action is confirmed, deletes the item from the Library.

You can delete from the Library from within a collection with Ctrl/Cmd-Delete or by right-clicking and choosing "Delete Selected Item from Library".

circeus

No, I mean, if for whatever reason I have duplicate entries (happen tome for all sorts of reasons), I can never tell whether I'm deleting an entry that's from the library alone or a collection (or even if the entry simply is incorrectly in the library instead of a collection).

noksagt

Everything is in the library (and can optionally be in one or more collections), so nothing is ever incorrectly in the library.

You can hold down a modifier key (ctrl on linux/windowd; option on mac) to see what collections an item belongs to. If you've expanded your collection hierarchy & can see all collections & also see that none are highlighted in yellow, you know the item doesn't belong to a collection.

dstillman

If you've expanded your collection hierarchy & can see all collections

And note that you can do this by clicking on a collection and pressing the '+' key .

scot

As my collection size grows, I do sometimes wish that I had an 'archive' that I could throw useful items into. Things I don't need now, but don't want to have to track down again. And maybe once in a while have a peek at that archive. I know that nothing in the current model precludes that, but I'm a bit of a reference packrat, and I have managed to get more than my laptop can handle gracefully (1300 main items, 1700 total, more than a hundred PDFs.) So (for different reasons) I, too, have thought that it would be nice to 'offload things out of my Library'. Just a thought.

(I know I could just export them, and put the exported files in directory to 'import someday'. or even create another firefox profile with my archive as the Zotero library. Both of these are a little unwieldy, but I'll do them if I need to.)

dstillman

OK, I could see there being a special Archive collection, though general performance improvements would obviously be the first priority.

circeus

"And note that you can do this by clicking on a collection and pressing the '+' key ."

Didn't know that. *adds that to the list of undocumented features*

"Everything is in the library (and can optionally be in one or more collections), so nothing is ever incorrectly in the library."

My bad. I meant "is only in the library instead of being, as planned, in a collection"


For the record, a prime reason for this issue is that when you delete a record from a collection, you should probably be asked whether you also want to delete it from the library, since the records otherwise continue to cramp up the library even though it originally looks as if it was deleted.

scot

Yeah, but "being asked" every time which you want to do isn't exactly the cat's meow, either. As it is, you can press Ctrl/Cmd-Delete or alternately, right-click and choose "Delete Selected Item from Library". The current UI's way of 'asking' whether you want to delete it from the Library as well as the collection is simply to ask you to tell it ahead of time. I didn't know about this mechanism until this thread came up, but I don't think I'd prefer it any other way. And the current behavior of "Confirm when you delete from the Library, but don't ask when removing from a collection" is really pretty good as well. Or?