Importing and combining several libraries

kevinwilson

Hi all, I've got a student who may have created a library or collection for each chapter in her dissertation. If it's a collection per chapter, then no problem. Could she have feasibly created a library for each e.g. she collected her references for her introduction, exported the RIS and saved it, then wiped her library? Then repeated for each subsequent chapter and now she may have several RIS files of different libraries. I'm guessing that this is technically possible. But how might one combine them all? Can you import them all in and they would appear as collections with a date and time stamp as is usual when you import a single library? Might she then have all libraries together in her My Library and new collections for each library? It's an odd way to have done it but if there are options if she did that, this would be useful. Thanks.

adamsmith

It seems unlikely she did this with libraries, but even if, what's the goal of getting the items back into Zotero? The citations will still work anyway

kevinwilson

Thanks Adam. Luckily she hasn't done that! But if one had no citations in Word, say, and had just exported libraries and then wiped Zotero, would it technically be possible to reintegrate them all together? Could you import several libraries and they would appear as different timestamped collections? It's clearly not something I'd recommend to anyone but just in case someone ever does it!

adamsmith

You could obviously import back into Zotero and the Word document works with embedded metadata without any data in Zotero, but would not be possible is to link back the citations to Zotero entries, no.