make collections work as folders

Riccardo Cohen

Hello
I like very much Zotero and find it really well done (using beta standalone mac/pc). I would like it to be THE tool for file sharing.

But there is one thing that I disagree with : collections work like iTunes playlists, not like windows folder. To be precise when you move a document from one collection to a sub collection, it is still in the primary, collection, when you suppress it, it is not suppressed, but appears in "documents without collection". This is not intuitive at all to windows users (or linux/mac).

This may be good for some people, but common users "think" moving it, and suppressing it, while it is not the action done. And when you don't care enough, you will finish with a big mess. In particular it is not possible to know in wich collection a document is.

So my question is
1) is it possible to change this behavior ?
2) if not as I expect, how to explain to users that moving is copying and deleting is not deleting
3) is it possible to find in which collection"s" a document is ?

Thanks a lot for your help

mronkko

1) Not without changing Zotero code.

2) It is not copying. Collections to articles is many-to-many relationship, so it is just a single copy that is in multiple collections. I would not use the concepts of moving, copying, and deleting when talking about collections. Rather, I would tell the user that they can use collections to classify articles by assigning them to collections so that one article can belong to multiple colletions at once. iTunes playlists are probably not a bad analogy here.

3) This is explained in the documentation

http://www.zotero.org/support/collections#identifying_the_collections_an_item_is_in

Riccardo Cohen

Thanks a lot mronkko for your quick and relevant answer.

About the 2) , I agree that you can put one document into several collections, which is not possible with folders. But people are used to folders...

All right, I think I'll live with it... (mind changing is not always confortable but always a progress)

adamsmith

1) no.
2) Most users will understand the concept of a playlist or of a gmail collection, that'd be one strategy to explain.
The other strategy is to just point to use cases: "You have the book by Smith in the collection of works on economic growth. Now you start a new article on the history of economic thought and start a new collection on this. If you move the Smith book to that collection, you'd not want the copy to disappear from the other collection. That's what Zotero allows you to do: You can have the same (virtual) copy of an item and its data in multiple places (collections)"
A third strategy is to point out the collections work exactly like tags, with the additional advantage that you can nest them, i.e. have de-facto hierarchical tags.

(note also that you're not actually "copying" - the item (and its attachments) still exists only once. All changes you make in one location affect the item in all location. That's the beauty of a virtual vs. a physical filing system.)

3.http://www.zotero.org/support/collections#identifying_the_collections_an_item_is_in

mronkko

Once you get the used to the idea of collections, then you will probably like them more than folders.

I used to organize articles in printed form so that each paper I was writing had a binder with all the articles used for that paper. When I used the same article for multiple papers, I had to have a new copy. Then when I made notes to the margin of one copy, I had to find that specific copy to read my nots. Now that I do my notes in PDF and store the papers electronic, it is really convenient that a single copy of an article can be associated with many papers (collections).

Riccardo Cohen

Thanks to all I understand.

JanaVotteler

Will the copying of references into many collections (folders) influence the size of the Zotero library? E.g. if one document is in three folders, the storage space is tripled?
Thanks for any help!

adamsmith

@Jana - no it won't - that's the whole point of collections - the item only exists once regardless of the number of collections it's in --> it only takes up storage place once.