Collection complexity, duplication and confusion in large collections.
I've been using Zotero intensively for over a decade. My library has about 25k items. I use tags and collections to structure my research, but both have become bewilderingly complex and full of duplication and error. On any specific project my collection tree is complex and deep, and it is not possible to use collection search to keep it in order. I routinely lose and duplicate sub-collections. With others, I have asked many times over many years for the developers to work on symbolic linkages between sub-collections (which would be both analytically powerful and a marvellous teaching tool). An issue has been alive for this since 2019 (but the discussion is much older) : https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/1730. But this seems not to be priority.
Given all the other (great!) development work, I am curious to understand how other Zotero users work with these problems of complexity over time. Do people start projects from scratch? Do they shuffle all the older items into a collection? Or do they resist collection / tag proliferation with iron discipline?
Given all the other (great!) development work, I am curious to understand how other Zotero users work with these problems of complexity over time. Do people start projects from scratch? Do they shuffle all the older items into a collection? Or do they resist collection / tag proliferation with iron discipline?
More generally, I also use our https://github.com/OpenDevEd/zotero-lib tool to maintain libraries, generate indices, etc.