Upgrade StorageTrying to understand the pecking order...
I just want to get clear on the architectural differences between an "Item" and a "Link."
When you highlight an Item in the center column, the right column changes to a tabbed interface, with Info, Notes, Attachments, Tags, and Related.
When you highlight a Link in the center column, the right column is different. There are no tabs, but there's a center box for (presumeably) Notes, and areas below it for Related and Tags.
It seems that an Item gets more functionality than a Link. Specifically:
-- With an Item, you can add more than one Note. With a link, you just get one box for Notes.
-- With an Item, you can add Attachments. (The default of which appears to be a Link to the page from which you created the Item.)
So, I'm trying to get the pecking order down. An Item is the base...thing, right? It can contain multiple other things, like Links, Attachments, Notes, etc.
Is this correct?
If I am using Zotero as a bookmarking engine, saving Links to all sorts of stuff, am I short-changing myself? Should I be saving Items for all my pages, instead of Links, so I get the higher functionality allowed for Items?
When you highlight an Item in the center column, the right column changes to a tabbed interface, with Info, Notes, Attachments, Tags, and Related.
When you highlight a Link in the center column, the right column is different. There are no tabs, but there's a center box for (presumeably) Notes, and areas below it for Related and Tags.
It seems that an Item gets more functionality than a Link. Specifically:
-- With an Item, you can add more than one Note. With a link, you just get one box for Notes.
-- With an Item, you can add Attachments. (The default of which appears to be a Link to the page from which you created the Item.)
So, I'm trying to get the pecking order down. An Item is the base...thing, right? It can contain multiple other things, like Links, Attachments, Notes, etc.
Is this correct?
If I am using Zotero as a bookmarking engine, saving Links to all sorts of stuff, am I short-changing myself? Should I be saving Items for all my pages, instead of Links, so I get the higher functionality allowed for Items?
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Standalone attachments are, as you've noticed, rather awkward and limited, and if we were designing things from scratch, it might not be possible to create them. But they do offer less overhead for certain limited uses of Zotero, and I suspect a good number of people who use Zotero as a bookmarking tool just use standalone attachments rather than full-blown items. If you don't need to store multiple snapshots or linked files of a single page, don't need multiple notes, don't need to store bibliographic information, and don't need to generate bibliographies, you might be able to get away with standalone attachments.
Keep in mind, though, that saving via site translators (URL bar icon) or Create New Item from Current Page (with the snapshot pref turned on) will automatically store some metadata that may be helpful when constructing searches or exploring your library. (For example, items can store the creation date of an article or blog post rather than just an access date, which allows you to find documents by date or even view a graphical timeline.) The metadata may also be useful in various ways on the Zotero server, whether for providing recommendations based on the items in your library or just to improve navigation. (If you've saved a magazine article using a translator that stored the author, you could quickly navigate to other articles by the same author.)
And I can't say for sure that it will always be possible to create standalone attachments or that there won't be other functionality that only works for regular items.