Best practice for group collaboration

emasyr

Hi, brand new to Zotero (several hours of playing around last night). We want to consider adopting it for a newly formed research group with members in several countries. Do you recommend setting up one account for the group and sharing login/pw, so everyone synchs their own desktop version from it? Or is it better for one person to have complete control, share the library (but not the account) with others, and the others can add/delete /conribute notes, but the admin can undo/restore if there is a problem?

When I played with it on my own with 2 accounts (one for the group, one for myself), I ended up accidentally deleting everything when a re-sycnhed up with a new account.

Admittedly I am still learning the ropes, but if there is a recommended approach that allows group members to contribute to a shared bibliography, and yet to have some fool-proof way to stop a disaster (like someone accidentally deleting something on their own computer and then deleting the entire cloud library asa result), I would really appreciate learning about it. Thank you for building such an amazing tool.

dstillman

Do you recommend setting up one account for the group and sharing login/pw

No, definitely not. Everyone should have their own account and should join a shared group library. That's the whole point of groups.

When I played with it on my own with 2 accounts (one for the group, one for myself), I ended up accidentally deleting everything when a re-sycnhed up with a new account.

When you switch between accounts locally, Zotero warns you that it will delete all local data and switch to the other account. If you say yes, it will do exactly that. This doesn't have anything to do with groups, though, since it doesn't affect the data online — you can just only have Zotero associated with one account and its data at a time, so Zotero needs to clear the local data before switching accounts.

if there is a recommended approach that allows group members to contribute to a shared bibliography, and yet to have some fool-proof way to stop a disaster (like someone accidentally deleting something on their own computer and then deleting the entire cloud library asa result)

You can't prevent people from deleting all the data if they have write access to the group — an item deletion is just an operation that gets synced like any other — but they would have to actually go out of their way to delete all the group items within Zotero itself. Simply deleting the Zotero data directory — or what you did to switch between accounts — wouldn't have any effect on the group.

But as long as someone in the group has a backup system that makes regular automated backups — e.g., Time Machine on a Mac — you'd always be able to restore data and overwrite the online library. (Zotero also stores local copies of the database on each computer for a couple days, so you'd be able to restore to one of the automatic backups no matter what, but that wouldn't include deleted files, so you should also have a proper backup of the Zotero data directory as part of a regular, automated full system backup.)