Upgrade Storageautomatically create tags with collection names?
Can somebody help me? For the past few hours i've read through forum discussions on collections and tags, but i haven't found a solution for my problem (even though I admit that i didn't fully understand everything in the forum discussions):
Since I've started using Zotero as my filing system for articles, I've always manually assigned to each item a tag with the names of the collection and subcollections that it belongs to. That way i can find e.g. all articles about "knee" when I'm searching in the "osteoarthritis" collection by clicking on the "knee" tag, and the other way around i can also find all "osteoarthritis" articles when I'm searching in the "knee" collection by clicking on the "osteoarthritis" tag. This might first seem redundant, but I find it very helpful to be able to search "from both sides". Achieving the same only by using collection trees would grow those out of proportion.
This system has worked well for me, but as my collection grows it's harder and harder to keep the tags manually updated as I add new items, move them between or delete them from collections.
My questions:
a) is there a way to automatically create and assign tags to an item with the collection names that the item belongs to, and to keep those tags automatically updated as the item is moved between collections?
b) if not, could that kind of a feature be possible created?
or c) can I somehow achieve the above described search options in a way that I haven't figured out yet?
Using the "automatically create tags from keywords" function didn't help me as it created way to many for me useless tags and not "my" tags.
Thanks so much for your help in advance!
PS.: May I also emphasize here how much I love Zotero and how much it helps me every day? Many thanks to everyone who donates time and effort to create and improve such a great program!!
Since I've started using Zotero as my filing system for articles, I've always manually assigned to each item a tag with the names of the collection and subcollections that it belongs to. That way i can find e.g. all articles about "knee" when I'm searching in the "osteoarthritis" collection by clicking on the "knee" tag, and the other way around i can also find all "osteoarthritis" articles when I'm searching in the "knee" collection by clicking on the "osteoarthritis" tag. This might first seem redundant, but I find it very helpful to be able to search "from both sides". Achieving the same only by using collection trees would grow those out of proportion.
This system has worked well for me, but as my collection grows it's harder and harder to keep the tags manually updated as I add new items, move them between or delete them from collections.
My questions:
a) is there a way to automatically create and assign tags to an item with the collection names that the item belongs to, and to keep those tags automatically updated as the item is moved between collections?
b) if not, could that kind of a feature be possible created?
or c) can I somehow achieve the above described search options in a way that I haven't figured out yet?
Using the "automatically create tags from keywords" function didn't help me as it created way to many for me useless tags and not "my" tags.
Thanks so much for your help in advance!
PS.: May I also emphasize here how much I love Zotero and how much it helps me every day? Many thanks to everyone who donates time and effort to create and improve such a great program!!
If you turn on the "recursive collections" hidden pref, all items in a collection and its subcollections will be displayed in the top-level collection.
You can then select all and drag them to the respective tag in the tag selector on the left to tag all of them.
b) I don't think it'd be terribly hard to do code for this to happen automatically, the bigger concern would whether there is enough demand to make it worthwhile and whether it can be done in a way that doesn't create more confusion than benefit.
c) The perhaps obvious answer to c) is to just use tags. By filtering for "knee" and "osteoarthritis" you'd get only articles that have both tags.
I have always had the recursive thing activated, but i never thought about that way to clean up my tagging system every now and then. would still take some time...but that idea helps.Thanks a lot!!
b) I can't answer the question about demand, but having the option of permanently and automatically linking tags and collections of items could have a few more advantages...and quite big ones, i think (especially for people that up to now have only used one of the two sorting options...of which there are quite a few i could imagine)
1. It seems like a lot of people are asking for hierarchal tags in the forum, but as I understand it, hierarchal tags would be very difficult to implement by developers. If you had the option of permanently linking the tags with the collections, the hierarchy of the collections and sub collections would be an indirect way to create a hierarchy to your tags, or at least give you a quick, hierarchal overview of all your tags.
2. If the tags of an item would always represent all the collections and sub collections the item is in, you could mark the item and then you could see with a quick glance at the tags all the other collections the item is in...much easier and quicker than pushing "alt" (on a mac) and then scrolling up and down through all your collections to see which ones are highlighted. especially if you have many collections it's hard to get an overview that way
3. maybe it could even be programmed the other way around, meaning that if you assign a tag to an item it would automatically be added to the equivalent collection. finding and linking an already existing tag to an item is often much faster than dragging and dropping an item into another collection (again, especially if your list of collections increases in size) (and if you would create a new tag, maybe zotero could also automatically create a new collection and then you would only have to move that collection to the correct hierarchy in your other existing collections).
Obviously, to someone who has an intricate sorting system of tags and collections in place, accidentally activating an option of "synchronizing" your tags with your collections would have a devastating effect to your library, so there would have to be plenty of warnings before zotero would automatically change the tags. However, i could imagine that many people with simpler filing systems or people who only use tags or collections anyway could find an option like that a very useful feature.
c) sure, only using tags would do that, but since i can't cluster my tags into groups i don't get the necessary overview in the beginning of my search to find that useful.
Thanks again for your help (and for your consideration?)
"maybe it could even be programmed the other way around, meaning that if you assign a tag to an item it would automatically be added to the equivalent collection. finding and linking an already existing tag to an item is often much faster than dragging and dropping an item into another collection (again, especially if your list of collections increases in size) (and if you would create a new tag, maybe zotero could also automatically create a new collection and then you would only have to move that collection to the correct hierarchy in your other existing collections)."
Just wanted to signal that this feature would be incredibly useful to me! Cheers!
______________________
Tag name (hierarchy): ALL
|
|---->Tag name: "Collection 1"
| |
| |--->Tag name: "Arthritis
| |
| |--->Tag name: "Knee"
}
}
|---->Tag name: "Collection 2"
| }
| }--->Tag name: "Collection 1"
| |
| |--->Tag name: "Hip"
}
}
(etc. - Tag hierarchy continues)
I can't see that the Zotero database design provides tagging that is flexible enough for all likely conditions that one might want though - e.g., (say) if you had the classic parent called "Priority", with mutually exclusive children "A", "B", "C" such that only one tag could exist at any given point - tagging an item as "A" also untagged the item if it was already tagged as "B" or "C", and similarly tagging items as "B" (untag either "A" or "C") or "C" (untag either "A" or "B").
On other occasions, one might want to have tags where a Condition--->Action is applied when an item is assigned a particular tag, or the tag could have a value - e.g., a date/time - which could be operated on (say) set a reminder for that date/time - or a number which could be accumulated (added up). It's all just a database.
Interestingly, most of the complex tagging requirements one might encounter have already been met by information management databases in the past - perhaps most notably in the form of Lotus Agenda.