Creating second library or other organization solution for large libraries

ejzejz

Hi,
I have a very large library of references, some of which I am keeping simply to reference at some stage but do not need to access them on a regular basis. Having such a large library slows down when Zotero initially loads, though, and makes it more complicated when I'm inserting citations through the Word integration.

For those of you who have similar issues and developers, do you create second libraries? Subcollections? Export and store them in another reference system? If you do create second libraries, could you point me to documentation on how to do that? I can't find anything specific in the documentation.

adamsmith

It depends on what your main issue is: If organization, including in Word, is, then just using groups would be an easy way to have multiple libraries.

If speed is a significant issue, then I think separate profiles might be the easiest solution. This solution: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles works with Zotero, too, with small modifications to the commandline commands.

bwiernik

In Zotero 5.0, you can selectively sync groups, so you could also move your "archived" references to a separated group library, then stop syncing it (once Zotero 5 is released out of beta).

ejzejz

Thanks.