How to clean "My library"

cretin

Is there a possibility to delete all entries in "My library" that are not used in any collection?

In my Zotero library, I have several collections. If I, for example, delete a collection, its entries are still in "My library" and are not deleted.
Because I did something like that several times before, I sometimes have five times the same entry in "My library", although it is not used in any collection or only used in one collection.
How can I "clean" My library?

thank you for your help
Aldi

arggem

It's in the works:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/665/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3240/duplicate-entry-warning

Until then, you need to sort your entries (probably by title) and delete them manually.

dstillman

If you don't have many collections, you can create a saved search with multiple "Collection" "is not" conditions and then delete the items that show up.

Deleting a collection, as you saw, does not delete the items. This is by design. To delete all items from a collection, select all the items, right-click on them, and select Delete Selected Items from Library.

However, copying an item to a collection doesn't actually duplicate it, so the only way you would have multiple copies of the same item in My Library would be if you imported that item multiple times.

cretin

Dan,
thank you very much! This was exactly what I was looking for!
However, I encountered some problems doing, what you have proposed. Zotero crashed several times with the message: An error has occurred. Please restart Firefox.
The Report IDs are: 992497497, 497464540, 211505208, 1650121057, 410806892, 1077187178.

In the end, I could manage to delete the items step-by-step. However, one single duplicate was not deletable at all. It is this entry that causes the error.

Thank you
Aldi

dstillman

Please try running your database through the DB Repair Tool.

cretin

Dan,

thank you. After repairing the database with the repair tool, I could delete the last remaining duplicate. Everything is fine now!

Kind regrards
Aldi