Merging group libraries

edited September 21, 2020
Hi all,

This doc https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/merging_libraries suggests that RDF is the way to go for merging group libraries. Is this completely lossless regarding the visible metadata and files? Are there any gotchas?

In particular, is this a problem: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/84562/dragging-non-downloaded-attachment-between-group-libraries#latest ?

The libraries I've got have a bunch of overlapping items. So I would be keen to preserve the owk:relations, as that would help me write a API script to merge items... I guess that isn't possible with the RDF route?

I also guess that the RDF route does not preserve folders?

Another route would be to use the API. To merge A onto B, go through A item by item and merge items into B. Sounds straight forward in theory, but in practice, well...

Has anybody done this before? Any thoughts?
  • Let me add a related question to the ones above, please.

    I am the owner of several group libraries: I train my students to work with Zotero and they are divided into groups, and each group has its separate group library. This allows me to supervise their work (data cleaning etc.), but the groups do not have access to other groups' libraries. Each group needs to compile a bibliography on the same topic, and the next step would be to merge these lists into one.

    By merging I do not only mean transferring all items into one of the single shared group libraries, lets call it group library A. This I could do easily. But then I would need to invite all those students who were not in that library A, but in B, C, or D, etc. to join library A.

    Instead, what I would need is merging the groups so that all members will be part of one large group library with access to all merged data. I believe this is not an option, is it? (Could this be done at one point so that we educators could preach Zoterism?)

    Thanks!
  • As far as I understand, that's not an option. I usually keep a spreadsheet with names and Zotero IDs. It's then very easy to add people to the required libraries. So if you had a spreadsheet with groups B, C, D (used to create those groups) you could then add them all to group A. That would sort out the membership, and seems easy?

    Merging the data is a bit tricky, as I've found that dragging from one library has some 'gotchas'. However, bar those, with a bit of tagging, it would be very cool to see which students found what.

    Just out of interest: Which subject is this in?
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