Search for collection by name?

franz47

After an evening of work with Zotero I must have either accidentally moved a collection to an unknown place in the tree or deleted it. I could not find the stuff in the "Trash" collection elsewhere. Is there a way to search for collections by their names? Could not easily find a way.

dstillman

Click on a collection, press the "+" key to expand all collections, and then start typing the name you're looking for.

franz47

Thanks for the answer.
I could not find my lost collections, but when searching from "My Library" for entries added today I can find a lot of the entries. When pressing ctrl to get the info, in which collection the entry is located, there is no place indicated. Still these entries are not in the Trash collection. Where are these entries located, if pressing ctrl does not show anything?

dstillman

They're just in your library. All items exist in the library, regardless of whether they're in any collections. It sounds like you accidentally deleted the collection, but that doesn't move the items to the trash. (There's a separate option in the context menu to do that.)

franz47

Thanks again!
I searched for the entries made yesterday and they all showed up. I highlighted all of them and tried to copy/move them to a new collection-directory, but that was not possible. I saved the results, they appeared in the library. Again when trying to copy the whole bunch of entries it was not possibel. Then I tried it with single entries and that worked. Is there really no way to do operations with more than one entry?

dstillman

Press "-" to collapse all items, and then drag them. (There's a known issue where, if any child items are selected, it's not possible to drag the set of items to a collection, because child items can't be dragged to collections on their own.)

franz47

I have done the reconstruction one by one. I got the impression that transferring an entry from the search results to a collection is impossible, if the identical entry is already existing at the target collection.

dstillman

Right, but note that it's not an "identical entry" — it's the same item.

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