Best way to give someone access to my Zotero so that they can clean up and format cite info?

summerj

I have a lot of documents that have been imported with incorrect or incomplete citation information and I want to give someone the ability to clean this up -- what's the best way to do that?

Can I create a user account for them to access my library? Can I download my library and they can clean up the information and send me back a file that I can upload? I know the most direct way is to give them my login information, but I'm uncomfortable with that approach.

Thank you for your help!

adamsmith

Anything other than the login information approach is going to be messy at this stage (the ideal approach starting fresh would be to start in a group library, have them join and clean items, then drag the cleaned items to your library).

How many items do you have in your library?

summerj

I have 5151 items in my library (but not all of them need to be cleaned, although I don't really want to individually select items from my library). Do you think that would work for your group library suggestion?

Thank you!

adamsmith

As I said, the group approach would have *started* with the items in the group. It's much harder to do with the items starting in your library.

The two approaches I can think of are:
1. Export the items to Zotero RDF, have them cleaned up, again exported to Zotero RDF, import those items and then merge all duplicates, using the cleaned version as the basis for the merge. Merging 5k items will be fairly painful, though, and I don't think you can effectively automate it.

2. Copy all items to a group, have them cleaned up there, then delete all items in your local library, empty the trash, and move the group items into your local library.
The delete step is necessary because you can't copy the same (even if changed) item back into your library again. The problem with this approach is that it will break all links to citations in existing Word/LibreOffice documents, so not ideal.

As you can tell, neither of these are terribly attractive options.

summerj

This is super helpful advice @adamsmith thank you! I actually haven't used Zotero for in-document citations yet because I just made the switch from Mendeley, so I think going the group library route hopefully shouldn't create too many headaches.

Thank you!