Upgrade StorageHow to sort items in Collections as I choose?
My habit when writing is to sort sources by order of usefulness/importance.
In Firefox's Bookmarks I simply preface all bookmarks in a folder with a "1,2,3...5", which allows easy sorting.
I haven't yet found an equivalent sorting practice for my Zotero collections. Tagging articles doesn't yield sorting, except by specifying an advanced search for specific tags - a clunky procedure.
Most people seem to use Zotero primarily as a footnoter. But to me its primary attraction is as a flexible article filing system, which enables me e.g. to classify articles by institutional affiliation of the author, as well as by subject. But I'd like to be able to sort the articles within collections as I choose.
In Firefox's Bookmarks I simply preface all bookmarks in a folder with a "1,2,3...5", which allows easy sorting.
I haven't yet found an equivalent sorting practice for my Zotero collections. Tagging articles doesn't yield sorting, except by specifying an advanced search for specific tags - a clunky procedure.
Most people seem to use Zotero primarily as a footnoter. But to me its primary attraction is as a flexible article filing system, which enables me e.g. to classify articles by institutional affiliation of the author, as well as by subject. But I'd like to be able to sort the articles within collections as I choose.
But note that items can belong to multiple collections, so keeping items in a specific arrangement across multiple collections might be difficult.
No need to have same arrangement across collections. The sorting only needs to be within a collection.
My comment about multiple collections concerns this scenario: You have the item "Jones et al. (2015)" in Collection A. You want it to appear first in the collection list, so you type "1" in Extra. Then you add that same item to Collection B. There, you want it to appear second. But you have already entered "1" in Extra. The same exact item can belong to multiple collections (think of collections like music playlists).
I see the point about collections.
However, for my very rough purposes, there are good articles and there are boring articles. Good are labelled 1, boring 5 - but they remain good or boring whichever collection they are in.
In my Collection "Planning structure" I now have only 2 pdfs with these titles:
A new vision for planning - there must be a better way!
Planning and culture unfolded - the case of Flanders and the Netherlands
These titles are both displayed in the Centre pane
At the top of the Centre pane, above the titles, there are now column headings:
Title.................................................Creator.....................Extra
The Creator column, obviously, has the names of the authors.
The Extra column has nothing in it. And I cannot write anything in it.
On the right pane of the page I have 4 tabs:
Info | Notes | Tags | Related
Extra is only there
All the middle pane is doing is showing the values that are entered in the fields in the right-hand pane.
(Using the extra field doesn't work because that is a global ordering.)
E.g. I'd like to keep a collection of items to read, and be able to sort it in the order I want to read them, but without affecting any other collections.
A kind of UI model that could be followed here is like Spotify -- every playlist has a manual order, but you can always override that at any time to order by Artist, Track, Most Recently Added -- but then also always go back to Custom.
I do realize that this would require Zotero to add a new (invisible) order data parameter to the collection-item association.
An additional request would be to add a new parameter that indicate its status, e.g. "to read" or "revise notes".
These two features may save quite some time.
It would take away the need to look up order and status elsewhere.
Currently, to achieve the desired order of my readings, I attach a code to every document to see what to read when and how important it is to read. The status of a reading is tagged in Notion at the moment.
For example, today's 1st required reading (AR1) of my afternoon course( 2020P44B) translates into 2020P44B-14AR1 tagged "to read".
PS I can write in the 'Extra' field, but it is sometimes automatically populated with the publisher (e.g. Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press).
For all sorts of reasons, some technical some conceptual, I wouldn't expect arbitrary user defined sorting to make it into Zotero any time soon, if ever.