Zotero PDF Reader and New Note Editor: Groups

sdflewrit783

I had a look at the functionality, which seems to have a lot of promise.

Can you clarify how this will work in group libraries? Participatory creation and editing of notes can be very useful but would benefit from features that could track authorship, changes, send notifications of changes or highlight changes with authorship clarified and control editing rights to be robust.

Thanks.

dstillman

Annotations will show the person who created them. Everything else will work the same as it does in groups now.

sdflewrit783

Thanks. I think it would be great to make authorship, both creating and modifying, clear and easily accessible for all content types: references (now accessible via the web interface only), notes and note fragments, PDF annotations. Some form of versioning or change tracking would be great too. If we imagine that new notes will be substantial and co-authored, it will be important/helpful to have tools to prevent unwanted modifications and a possibility to restore previous states on the per-note basis as the whole database backup is far too drastic for this. It would be good to be able to search for these things too.

Thanks for considering.

adamsmith

The authorship labels make sense, but beyond that I think you're moving into feature creep territory. If you want a version controlled writing system, I'd use a version controlled writing system, not a reference manager.

sdflewrit783

Fair enough, thanks for clarifying this position. We only use the notes now to mark who added a reference and why, where relevant, in one line. I thought the new system was intended to expand the scope.

We do use external tools for full text search, annotation, and version control so shall stay as we are.