Upgrade StorageHow to communicate the location of a new collection (in a group library) to a collaborator
I almost never use "My Library", but almost all of our work uses shared group libraries - IMHO an amazing feature of Zotero!!
One problem we have is how to communicate the location of a new collection to collaborates (within the same group library). Typically, I might email collaborators and say "I've added these new items to the collection Z, which is located here" (screenshot).
Collection Z is easily shared, because I can cut/paste the collection name. However,it's harder to find for the collaborators (in a large, complex library). E.g. if Z is located here:
X
- Y
-- Z
then I usually attach a screenshot. I suppose there isn't a quick way to copy that hierarchy to a string, e.g. "X > Y > Z" or even better to generate some kind of URL that would let users open that collection?
One problem we have is how to communicate the location of a new collection to collaborates (within the same group library). Typically, I might email collaborators and say "I've added these new items to the collection Z, which is located here" (screenshot).
Collection Z is easily shared, because I can cut/paste the collection name. However,it's harder to find for the collaborators (in a large, complex library). E.g. if Z is located here:
X
- Y
-- Z
then I usually attach a screenshot. I suppose there isn't a quick way to copy that hierarchy to a string, e.g. "X > Y > Z" or even better to generate some kind of URL that would let users open that collection?
I'm not sure if Zutilo can generate those links yet, though. Now that we always have a menubar (which I still forget), we could consider adding the ability to generate zotero://select links from Zotero itself.
Would a menu bar option (in Tools I assume) be most appropriate, or would a context menu option in Zotero to "Copy Link to [Item/Collection/Libary]" with "Zotero App" and "On zotero.org" suboptions be better?
We never planned features with a menubar in mind, since it wasn't universal until 5.0, and I think starting to use it more could (somewhat) free us to add more esoteric functionality without worrying about cluttering up the rest of the UI.
That said, if the people who want this will just prefer it in the context menu, there's not a lot of point in adding it to the menus and having people continue to use a plugin for it.
(I guess the real solution here is to make the context menu customizable. I'm never sure whether that's a sign of empowering flexibility or uncontrolled complexity…)
We could also consider adding a Copy submenu to the context menus, with the Quick Copy options and these.