Using Zotero with a group; sharing file repository

jhuebert

I'm looking into sharing a large Zotero library that has over 1000 pdf attachments with a group in my office. They will want to occasionally add references to the repository. I suggested that we all share a single Zotero account and let the autosync take care of merging changes.

This seems like a workable idea, but then each person has to have a copy of the entire attachment library on their local computer (>3GB data). Is there a way to share - perhaps if we were all to use a common location on the office network? Is that what the "Linked Attachment Base Directory" option is for?

bwiernik

The best approach to this is to create a group library and invite each person as a member with their own account. This will have the least chance for sync conflicts across the many computers and would enable each person to maintain their own private library in addition to the group, but you would likely need to subscribe to additional storage space (only for the group owner).

If you do decide to have a shared account, then you could either have members only log into zotero.org to access the resources (allowing them to maintain their own zotero accounts for other work—this would also likely require a storage subscription). Alternatively, you could use Zotero storage or WebDAV syncing and have members set Files to download “As needed” in Zotero’s sync preferences to reduce the required local storage space if they sync the account to the local Zotero program.

Setting the linked files base directory is a final option, but that requires the most work to setup and maintain.

internationaled

@bwiernik We would love to be able to select the Linked Files Base Directory option for Zotero group libraries. In this case, our users could use whatever storage approach they would like to use on a per-library basis. Their personal libraries could be Zotero synced or WebDav synced or whatever, and the group library could be set up for Linked File Base Directory.

In our case, we are looking for a workflow in which our team members drop PDFs into a dropbox, and someone on the team uses Zotfile to process these and store them as a Linked File, saved in a shared Google Drive folder. We need the PDFs to be available to our larger non-Zotero research team through that shared (read-only) Google Drive folder.

Are there any workarounds you would recommend for this?

adamsmith

I'm afraid there is simply no currently viable workflow that allows you to use linked files and groups. It's either/or.

For your set-up, this also simply wouldn't work without having relative links available for groups, the absence of which is the reason Zotero doesn't allow links in groups.