Move all related items to a new collection

lgoster

Hi to everyone,

I installed Zotero a few months ago and began to use it as my collection manager. I created some collections and added items (PDF files, Web pages, ...) to them. I tagged them and related items between themselves.

My problem is now that the collection has got too big and thus I would like to select an item from a collection and all its related items so that I can copy/move them to a new sub-collection. Is there any way to do this? I have tried to search for the items related to a particular item but I it does not seem possible.

Thanks for your help,

Luis

fbennett

The Zotero Item History plugin might serve your needs. I haven't worked with it for quite awhile, but it seems still to tie into Zotero's navigation within a given collection. You would clear the history, then you would need to navigate to each in a set of related items. You could then select the current history set, and move or copy the items. Then you would clear the history and repeat the process for the next set. Depending on how many items and relations you're dealing with, it could be more or less attractive as a solution.

fbennett

Playing with the plugin again, I was initially worried that part of its functionality might no longer work. But thinking about your use case brought my memory of the design back into focus, and a bit of testing seems to show that it's still fully operational.

It's actually meant to solve exactly the problem you're facing. A navigation history is saved for each collection that is explicitly visited: clicking on a collection chooses that collection's history. When you navigate to an item located elsewhere (in another collection, or in no collection), via a relation, the move is recorded in the history of the collection where you started -- so you can retrace or capture the items visited through a chain of relations, even if they are scattered across separate collections in your library.