Working with a very large group

Hi, I'm a librarian at the University of North Carolina. I'm well-versed in Zotero as an individual user and in small groups, but have some questions about working with a larger team.

I'm working with a group of researchers who are collaborating to write an Oxford Handbook. It'll be an extensively researched publication with (probably) thousands of sources used. There will be dozens of authors collaborating on the work.

I've worked with them to set up a shared folder in a way that mostly meets their needs, and I've explored all the options, but now some other questions have come up that I haven't run into before:

-They'll be using a very rigid series of tags to organize the saved items. Is there a way to prevent group members from adding a tag which doesn't already exist?

-Many of the books they'll be citing have an editor, but no primary author. Zotero seems to always import the editor as an Author instead. I've tried pulling edited books from many different library catalogs, but editor always shows up as an author instead. Is this an issue with the catalogs, or a limitation of Zotero?

-There's also an elaborate system of subfolders used to organize resources. Many of the collaborators are confused to see items appear in both a subfolder and the root shared folder. Is there a way to disable this?

And lastly, does anybody have any tips for working with Zotero on a very large project like this?

Thanks!
  • They'll be using a very rigid series of tags to organize the saved items. Is there a way to prevent group members from adding a tag which doesn't already exist?
    no. But you could suggest to the researchers to only add tags to items by dragging the items to the tag in the tag selector on the left - that would of course prevent the selection of any new tags.
    Many of the books they'll be citing have an editor, but no primary author. Zotero seems to always import the editor as an Author instead. I've tried pulling edited books from many different library catalogs, but editor always shows up as an author instead. Is this an issue with the catalogs, or a limitation of Zotero?
    it's certainly not a limitation of Zotero and I've seen many library catalogs that don't deal with edited volumes correctly (i.e. don't label editors as such.), but in some cases it might be a problem with a specific Zotero translator - if you have a permalink to an item I'm happy to look.

    The Library of Congress catalog should do this in general (though IIRC it might mistakenly label editors as contributors - we can fix that, though), as should the new generation of iii encore's, such as CU Boulder's Chinook:
    http://encore.colorado.edu/iii/encore/record/C__Rb5910060__Sthelen__P0,3__Orightresult__X4?lang=eng&suite=cobalt
    -There's also an elaborate system of subfolders used to organize resources. Many of the collaborators are confused to see items appear in both a subfolder and the root shared folder. Is there a way to disable this?
    no. Collections are _not_ folders - a good way to think about them is playlist - if you're adding an mp3 to a playlist, it will still exist in the list of all your music files (and if you remove an item from a collection (or playlist) you aren't actually deleting it.
  • Thanks for the info! This confirms most of what I thought.

    As for the LoC catalog, you're right - it does mistakenly label editors as contributors. Can I help fix that somehow?

    As for other catalogs, thanks for the input. I thought it was likely a local issue like that. Here's an example of one in our catalog that shows up in Zotero with authors instead of editors: http://search.lib.unc.edu/search?R=UNCb6224309

    Any tips on what we can change on our end to fix that?

    Thanks again for all your help.
  • I believe the MARC 700 is unclear as to role and is most frequently used for authors, which is why Zotero treats the editors of the book in the UNC catalog as authors. See http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bd700.html
  • ah, so to fix it we'd have to move the editors' names to a different MARC field? Nuts, that would need more extensive systematic work than I'd hoped.
  • Well, I could be misinterpreting MARC-- I don't have a cataloging background. But we do import from MARC, so we are working from its semantics. Maybe you can confirm that we are right in interpreting 700 as author by default? Or point to other data in the record we could be using to determine reliably that these 700 entries are editors?
  • It may help to know that nowadays libraries are implementing a much wider use of the relationship between a personal name and the resource described in MARC bibliographic records. What this means is that, for example, an editor's name in MARC 700 would be followed by subfield $e, and then "editor" or "ed." Another way would be to add subfield $4 and the relator term "edt". See http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bdx00.html , http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/
    Hope this helps.
  • thanks, if that's relatively consistently implemented, this may allow for a cleaner solution than we currently have, I'll take a look, though likely not super-soon.
  • (I checked - not even the LoC does this in any consistent way - I checked multiple edited volumes, no editor relator used in subfields e or 4. Too bad).
  • we're now importing correctly importing editors from MARC, including from the LoC
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