Mark or remove item from "My Library"

jasidlauskas

I generally research by pulling a bunch of material at a time for later reading. It saves to "My Library". I then go down the list, annotate the items and sort them into an appropriate "Collection" folder.

It's hard to keep track of where I'm at in the reading, notating and organizing list because items are visible in both the Library and Collection folders.

Is there a way to mark or make the item invisible in "My Library" once it's moved to its appropriate collection within the library? Or, is there a more logical way to use the Zotero file system that I'm not getting?

adamsmith

Items are always in My Library. Don't think of Zotero's collection as a file system. They don't behave like folders but rather along the lines of gmail labels or iTunes playlists.

Two things you can do:
1) Use the "Unfiled Items" collection which shows all items not in any collection
2) Always sort items into a "to read/file" (or something like that) collection and remove them from there once you've placed them in their final collection(s)

jasidlauskas

Thanks Adam for the tips. As you can see, I'm still learning the flow of Zotero. The better I understand it, the more I like it.

For help in sorting, is there a way to view which collections an item is part of? For example, if an item is in my "to read/file" collection and I want to make sure it's been sorted, can I select the item and see if its in one or more collections?

adamsmith

https://www.zotero.org/support/collections_and_tags#identifying_collections_an_item_is_in

jasidlauskas

Thanks again Adam.

After reading up a little on tags, and for my preference and project, I now see that I was using collections for what I should've been using tags to do (I was quickly creating a web of sub-collections in dozens of collections with items all over the place. It'll become too clunky for my taste)

For my case, that visual clunkiness is a "limitation" of the visual hierarchy. Before I get all tag-happy, though, I'm wondering if anyone can link a good discussion or resource outlining the limitations of tags.

Are tags and collections generally considered competing systems for organization, or am I likely to find an approach that makes good use of both methods?

bwiernik

They are good complementary organization systems. You can use both together in a way that works for you. For example, I use tags to indicate the topics an article is about and collections to indicate which project it was part of.

adamsmith

And there's no right or wrong way of doing this. To give you another example, I use collections for all substantive organization of items and use tags for "to do" type flags (to read, to buy/get, check metadata, etc.)