Comparing contents of "My Library" collection and Group libraries

asallen

Sorry if I've not been able to find something about this already, but is there a way -- using perhaps the new and awesome duplicate detection feature -- to compare the contents of two collections, one in my personal library and the other in a group library?

What I'm getting at is this: The Group library has stuff on a topic that I need to add to, and it has hundreds of items already but hasn't been updated in, say, six months; my own library has most of the same stuff in the Group library, but it's been more recently updated. There are, in other words, duplicates in both and uniques in both, but I want to add only the uniques from my library to the Group library. Of course, I can do this manually for a few items, but we're talking hundreds alas...

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or advice.

dstillman

While there's currently no way to compare/merge two libraries, if you just drag all the items you want from one library to the other, any that already exist in the target library shouldn't be duplicated, as long as you previously transferred them the same way. Behind the scenes Zotero tracks items copied between libraries and won't copy them again. (I'd still recommend testing this with a smaller subset of items first.)

Also note that it won't update any metadata on the existing items that you made changes to. Functionality to keep two libraries in sync is planned, but it's still a ways off.

asallen

Thank you, Dan. I did do some small scale trials, and because I did not previously transfer them from my library to the group library (in some cases it was from another account, in some cases someone else did it), then I ended up with duplicates.

So while I can just end up with duplicates and find them manually, is there any way to do duplicate checking on a group account?

Thanks!

dstillman

Sure. Right-click on the group library and select Show Duplicates.

asallen

Excellent! That solves it then -- I'll just copy over everything to/from the two libraries and then do the awesome duplicate detection features on both the group library and my library. Small thing, but that right click helps a lot!

Thank you!