[Suggestion] Group documents (for multi-volumes books)

AntoineTA

Hi everyone and Zotero devs,

It would be great if you could group documents under a single item in the documents list view (the centre panel). I think that would greatly improve the way Zotero handles multi-volume books (or more generally, multi-part documents).

At the moment, if I have a work that is separated into many volumes (e.g. the 'complete works' of a prolific author), I am forced to create a separate document for each volume, which quickly clutters the documents list.

My suggestion to solve the problem is this: add a new item category (in addition to "documents", "notes", etc.) named a "document group" or something similar. This item would have associated 'creator', 'title and 'date' fields (and maybe other useful fields too). It would appear on the document list on the same level as the other documents, but it would also allow the user to add other documents under it. You could collapse this document group to hide the documents under it.

Here is an illustration of what I am thinking.

At the moment, the documents list looks like that:

Frege | 1948 | Sense and Reference
Hume | 2007 | An enquiry concerning human understanding
Husserl | 2001 | Logical Investigations Volume 1
Husserl |2003 | Logical Investigations Volume 2
Mill | 1968 | Utilitarianism


With what I am suggesting, it would look something like that:

Frege | 1948 | Sense and Reference
Hume | 2007 | An enquiry concerning human understanding
Husserl | 2001-2003 | Logical Investigations
>Husserl | 2001 | Logical Investigations Volume 1
>Husserl |2003 | Logical Investigations Volume 2
Mill | 1968 | Utilitarianism


Or like that when the group is collapsed:

Frege | 1948 | Sense and Reference
Hume | 2007 | An enquiry concerning human understanding
Husserl | 2001-2003 | Logical Investigations
Mill | 1968 | Utilitarianism



What do you think? Would an implementation be feasible?

Thank you.

legna

Multi-volume books would be a great addition- at the moment I have 14 copies of William Waller Henings "Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, From the first session of the Legislature in the year 1619" so that I can capture all 14 volumes. (Not to mention the 5 'historical records Australia' or the 20 'complete works of Benjamin Franklin').
It is nearly impossible to pick the right volume when citing, so if such a thing is created it would be great to add "vol x" as visible when selecting the source in word - at the moment I have made each duplicate of the item with the volume number at the start of the title so I know which is which, then I manually edit them out later.

Edit: Also, it would be great if it could see all of these as the same title, so it use the proper short title (even if a different volume). Right now I have to do that manually, which is a pain.

ipersuade

This is a great idea. It seems to me when you have multivolume works, Zotero tends to see them as duplicates. I have an entire magazine repository in my Zotero database, each with a different volume number. Zotero always reports them as duplicates. This group feature might fix that problem.