Reconciling Students->Group Libraries after the Semester Ends

Brown Biomechanics

We have one Group account with multiple libraries in my lab. When new students come in I worry about loss of refs, so I only give them read access to the Group Libraries. They copy the references specific to their project to their libraries and then through out the semester they add to it. When they leave, Id like to add the refs that they found during the semester to our labs Group Library.

I know there is no automatic way to reconcile their library with the Group Library, but I'm wondering if anyone has found any tricks for doing this?

Thanks!

adamsmith

Two ideas:
1. You could tag all references in the original group library, say with OLD REFERENCE. Then do an advanced search for tag -- is not -- OLD REFERENCE and you'll only see items added by the students.
2. You could just sort by date added in the students' library and move reference after a given point over.

fbennett

In our writing program, we run a read-write and a read-only library. Students stash new references in the read-write library. I (or an assistant) have read-write access to both, and we curate and move new references into the read-only version after the end of term. (After the merge, we just rely on duplicates detection to pick up items that should be merged.)

Brown Biomechanics

Thanks for the great thoughts!

Tags - did not think of that and sounds like our best option

Date added - dont think that will work because both libraries are being added to.

Dups - we have tried and is our fall back, but has been very laborious for us, maybe we are not using correctly.

Gurdas_Sandhu

I second the method used by @fbennett with minor modifications to make it more real-time. Say your main library is called MAIN and only you and selected people have read-write access to it, and everyone else has only read access to it. Create a second library, called MAIN_BETA, and give everyone read-write access. Any new reference HAS to first be submitted to MAIN_BETA, which then gets pulled over to MAIN by the admins. You can easily do this on a daily or weekly basis. Members NEVER cite from MAIN_BETA, which is just a clearing house. MAIN_BETA has a two additional tags called "new" and "update" which tells the admins if a reference is new (and does not exist in MAIN) or is updated version of an item existing in MAIN. What this means is that everyone uses MAIN for citation and it is always current (rather than getting updated at the end of the term) and MAIN_BETA gets cleared regularly and has a few references (awaiting attention) at any given time.

You could have collections (or tags) in MAIN that correspond to each project, if you like to track that. The same collections or tags can exist in MAIN_BETA. But overall, at any point there are only TWO libraries to manage - MAIN and MAIN_BETA.