Editing limits in group library?

annabelle.wiegart

Hi, I work in a large scientific library, and we are evaluating Zotero as a tool for handling our acquisitions workflows. The Zotero documentation at https://www.zotero.org/support/groups states: "There is no limit on how many members may join your groups". However, our Zotero group library would need several hundred members to be able to edit the library at the same time, with the potential of several users editing the same title simultaneously. Can the Zotero cloud handle this quantity, or are there likely to be issues with significant lagging and editing conflicts?

dstillman

Depends what you mean by "editing the same title simultaneously". Generally, if everyone has auto-sync enabled, there won't be a problem. But if two people change the same field (e.g., Title) at the exact same time in conflicting ways, there'd of course be a conflict that would need to be resolved.

annabelle.wiegart

By "editing the same title simultaneously" I mean mainly moving the title record into another subcollection, e.g. from "selected" to "ordered". In our workflow, if the sync is done with a few seconds delay, this could lead to a book being ordered twice when it should be ordered only once. Another possible simultaneous user action would be the editing of a note field stating who has ordered the book. In general, my concern is that several hundred users logged in simultaneously viewing and editing the same group library could slow down the sync significantly (e.g. to 20 seconds or more). Can you reassure me regarding this point? And can you tell me if an error message is displayed if there are editing conflicts?

dstillman

The number of users in the group has no effect on syncing speed.

If Zotero can merge changes automatically — e.g., if two different fields are modified on an item or if an item is added to different collections at the same time — it will do so. If there's a conflict, it will show a conflict resolution dialog.

I'm not sure what you mean by "a note field". If two different people create notes at the same time, those are just separate notes. If the same note is edited, that could result in a conflict, and that would probably be the most likely source of conflicts. (Notes are also synced a bit less aggressively, since we don't want to sync constantly while people are typing.)

Also, to be clear, all of this is about the Zotero desktop app, which is what you'd want to be using for any significant work. There's no conflict resolution in the web library — if two people make conflicting changes there, the second change would be rolled back with an error. But changes there are also made slightly more quickly, so conflicts there might be slightly less likely.

annabelle.wiegart

Thank you very much for the clarification @dstillman!