A colleague I work closely with and share several Zotero groups with was adding a whole bunch of items to a Zotero collection he created by just dragging the files (Word docs and PDFs) into the collection from his Mac Finder. This resulted in a collection that has a whole bunch of document names listed in the center pane; if you click the center pane items, the various documents themselves open.

HOWEVER, associated with ONE of these freestanding attachment documents (a Word Doc), he took some "notes" in the right-hand editing pane that appears next to the item when you have the item selected. Now, no matter which attachment item he goes to and highlights in the center column, that SAME SET OF NOTES appears in the right-hand editing pane. It appears that what should be a little set of notes embedded (it is not a "child") with one attachment has propagated across the entire collection (and even onto some attachments in another collection that he shares with me in our "group")!

We tried deleting the original attachment on which he took the "notes," but the notes seem to appear there (in the right hand pane) when you select (in the center pane) other attachments.

Any suggestions? I have searched the forums, and all I found was some general mention of these "embedded" notes that you can apparently create with freestanding attachments (as opposed to "child" notes that go under attachments that have proper top-level metadata). But I didn't see anything about this propagation issue or how to get rid of these (I'm advising him to go in and create proper top-level "items" for which his file attachments would be children, but that's another matter).

Thank you.