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!
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!
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 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.
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.
Hope this helps.