Upgrade Storageworking with notes
Right now, Zotero does not seem to be very well suited for notetaking. Perhaps it is supposed to be mostly a tool for collecting references and full-text items, not for notetaking. But in case it isn't, here are some features that could be improved.
Take, for example, a saved search that contains only notes. It's impossible to know from a list of records where the notes come from. If I scroll through, I can see the titles of item types they linked to in the right pane, but only if there is a title--for item types such as letters or interviews I see nothing.
If I click above the note to get to the no-title item type, I'm taken out of my saved search and back to the entire library folder. Then when I go back to my saved search, I lose my place in the list of notes and I have to start all over again.
If I start clicking on tags to further narrow down my saved search, additional records start appearing--item types with this tag that were not found in my saved search originally. What i need to see instead is only the notes from my saved search that have this tag.
If I click on a tag that is attached only to notes (meaning in the entire library there are no item types with this tag, only notes), nothing happens at all. It seems that tags are only set to interact with item types and do not work with notes (or attachments?) at all.
In general, Zotero seems to be phasing out notes altogether. You can search for a phrase or regexp within an attachment but not within a note--are we now supposed to take our notes in a word document, then attach it, so we can locate a particular phrase within our own notes? And there is no field to add page number, which is still pretty important for people who work with printed texts, as opposed to online sources.
Again, perhaps Zotero is mostly a bibliographic tool "to collect, manage, and cite" sources, as it is described on the home page--in this case, feel free to ignore these comments.
Take, for example, a saved search that contains only notes. It's impossible to know from a list of records where the notes come from. If I scroll through, I can see the titles of item types they linked to in the right pane, but only if there is a title--for item types such as letters or interviews I see nothing.
If I click above the note to get to the no-title item type, I'm taken out of my saved search and back to the entire library folder. Then when I go back to my saved search, I lose my place in the list of notes and I have to start all over again.
If I start clicking on tags to further narrow down my saved search, additional records start appearing--item types with this tag that were not found in my saved search originally. What i need to see instead is only the notes from my saved search that have this tag.
If I click on a tag that is attached only to notes (meaning in the entire library there are no item types with this tag, only notes), nothing happens at all. It seems that tags are only set to interact with item types and do not work with notes (or attachments?) at all.
In general, Zotero seems to be phasing out notes altogether. You can search for a phrase or regexp within an attachment but not within a note--are we now supposed to take our notes in a word document, then attach it, so we can locate a particular phrase within our own notes? And there is no field to add page number, which is still pretty important for people who work with printed texts, as opposed to online sources.
Again, perhaps Zotero is mostly a bibliographic tool "to collect, manage, and cite" sources, as it is described on the home page--in this case, feel free to ignore these comments.
My first response to your request for a 'page number' field is: "Do you really need that?" and "Can't you just throw it in as the last thing in a note? (in parens, for example). I would rather take all my notes for a given item in *one* note, so I can still see the connections between them (but I do want that note to have minimal structure). But I share an office with a fanatical one-quote-per-note man. To him a note on a book needs the classical 3 pieces of metadata: classification tags, reference to the resource it belongs with, and page number. Zotero handles the first two of these already.
Perhaps you can add to your original post by saying why you want page numbers in a separate field?
Page numbers are also relevant to working with notes apart from sources--what I'm used to seeing above the note (instead of current title or no-title link to source) is a short citation--last name of author, short title, and page number. that line makes it obvious where the note belongs. It would also be great if control-clicking on that cite would then allow me to copy a footnote reference, with page number, to clipboard (and that is not possible unless you have a separate field for page number).
In general, there should be some field to indicate the location in a source where the note points--not just a for a book--other examples could include time code for a video/audio source, or GPS info for a map, etc.
The more fundamental problem of non-matching parent items not showing up in the search has been discussed quite a bit. See this thread and the three linked from it. We welcome other suggestions. Beta 4 offers a "Child Note" search condition that lets you search for content in child notes and display just the parent items, so you might want to consider using that instead of just "Note". I still don't know if we have a great solution for quicksearch. The best approach may be to display matching top-level items, matching children, and non-matching parents of matching children in gray. I'm not sure about non-matching siblings—on the one hand, if all siblings displayed in gray they could make browsing through search results quite tedious, but if they weren't shown that could be confusing/alarming and also require you to switch to the library to view them and therefore lose your place in the results. Not clear on this, or at least can't reproduce it. Can you provide an example, including the search conditions on the saved search? As I mentioned on the ticket, this is due to child items not technically belonging to collections. I've been meaning to fix it for a while. Not sure why you'd reach the conclusion that we're phasing out notes... Search conditions, "Note" and "Child Note" included, are all phrase searches, and we added phrase searching in the quicksearch bar (by use of quotation marks) in Beta 3. We have no (remotely efficient) way of supporting regular expressions for note content until Mozilla supports user-defined SQLite functions in mozStorage—the REGEXP function in SQLite is just a placeholder for a UDF. I'll let other people discuss this. I generally agree with Bruce that this could just be solved by semantic markup (probably aided by some UI magic), but wanting to sort by page number is a legitimate concern. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of manual ordering of notes—that seems potentially more useful than manual ordering of items within collections (which we might eventually support too). I guess a workaround would be to put the page number at the beginning of the note...
Thanks again for replying, Elena
This gets at some big design issues, actually. For example, when you say "links notes to ..." that might suggest some real modeling, rather than just simple annotations. In RDF terms, you'd be linking to the page/corrdinate/etc, which is then attached to the main item.
But I suppose allowing flexible key/values (which is more than a tag of course) to be attached to notes would help this. Perhaps that flexible key/value approach could also be integrated into the in-content markup too.
Just thinking out loud ...
But if you don't have the actual attachment/map/video file/book, then you'd only have the parent item and notes. What would then RDF look like? A use case would be annotating a dvd of a film, then exchanging timecoded notes with another user, who could load his own copy of the same dvd and map the annotations to particular moments in the film. Same model as books, only for video. Map coordinates could be exchanged in this way also in theory.
<x:Note>
<x:annotates rdf:resource="urn:isbn:23988734#page=23"/>
<rdf:value>blah, blah, blah ...</rdf:value>
</x:Note>
<x:Segment rdf:about="urn:isbn:23988734#page=23">
<dcterms:isPartOf rdf:resource="urn:isbn:23988734"/>
</x:Segment>
<x:Book rdf:about="urn:isbn:23988734">
...
</x:Book>
Do you see what I'm getting at?
Folks running a dev build should give both a try and let me know how it works out. There might be bugs, so testing would be appreciated.
Didn't implement Elena's ellipsis idea for non-matching child items yet, though I might—I could see that potentially working well.
When I'm in a collection I still see all tags available (not greyed out), whereas I should be seeing only tags linked to the documents in this particular collection.
If I do a quick search within a collection, the documents shown in middle pane are correct--only the items matching the search criteria in this collection show up. But the tags available in the tag selector match all items in the entire library with these search criteria--some of these tags do not belong to the items in the middle pane.
Many thanks for this change and also for drag-and-drop from the file system--that works fabulously as well.
[Sender Last{ et al.}; Receiver Last{ et al.}; Item Type, Date], for example:
[Thoreau; Emerson; Letter, 5 Jan 1859], or for interviews:
[Thoreau; Emerson; Interview, 5 Jan 1859]
If it's hard to distinguish between senders and receivers for auto-generation, just listing last names of all authors would work ok--there are usually only one of each and if there are more presumably the researcher can figure it out from the context in the note.
Also, the quick search for a phrase (using quotation marks) doesn't seem to find phrases in attachments, even when searching for the same phrase in the advanced search (using the pulldown menu) does.
I also updated the items pane to properly gray out non-matching items when viewing a saved search. This does raise one problematic issue of how the quicksearch and tag selector should work, however. Currently, the scope they use to search (and display tags from, in the case of the tag selector) comprises solely the non-gray items. This means that if you have a child note "Foo" on item "Bar" and do a quicksearch in the Library for "foo", only the tags on "Foo" (which is black) will show up in the tag selector, not the tags on "Bar" (which is gray). That's probably the expected behavior. However, it also means that if you have a saved search that searches for notes containing "foo", typing "bar" into the quicksearch will find no items, since "Bar" is just a gray context item and isn't included in the quicksearch scope. While that makes sense on a theoretical level, it probably has the potential to be confusing for users who are used to using the quicksearch bar to find anything in the current view. It also means that if you had, say, a saved search for recently modified items, and some of those were child notes, and those notes pulled in their parent items as (gray) context items, you wouldn't be able to find the parent items with the quicksearch.
Should the quicksearch behave differently within a saved search and include all siblings, parents and children of in-scope items? If so, when you match a gray item, does it remain gray, since it still doesn't match the saved search? How then do you know that it was what the quicksearch matched?
Alternatively, might there just be an advanced search option along the lines of "Match item sets" that would display all siblings, parents and children of matched items in black, which could then be filtered via the quicksearch normally?
Other ideas?
But it would also be great to show the actual found items within the entire "matching set", and I don't see how to do that without color coding found and not found items--say, green for found items and blue for other items in the entire "matching set." Then in this case above: You'd see tags for "Foo" in green, and tags for "Bar" in blue and all other tags greyed out.
And in this case: You will find the "bar" items but they will remain blue--not in the original found set for the saved search.
Also, in light of this discussion perhaps it does make sense to use ellipsis for extra greyed-out notes--to make the view simpler at least initially.
More importantly, if a note is found but its parent item is not, the note does not appear at all. The only way to fix this I can think of is to add a short reference for the parent item which would be printed together with each found note, along the lines described earlier in this thread for an interview or letter (i.e. Author Last[, et. al]; Short Title [Item Type if no Title], Date).
If anyone has other thoughts on how to make reports correspond to found sets let me know.
For notes, I'm now using my own crude build of Filemaker. By tagging notes with outline rubrics and dates, I'm able to sort them into "narrative outline" and "timeline" views, showing many notes (from different sources) in sequence, on the same page. These views are very useful as conceptual scaffolds during the writing process.
On the bibliog side, I do record each source in my Filemaker build (in the old grueling, manual fashion) before I enter notes based on it. I also include a bibliog field on each note so that I know which source it came from.
BUT -- and I think this is whence Zotero's weakness on notes stems -- I treat bibliog items and notes as "equals," i.e. all are individual, independent "items" or database entries. I then sort these into views that segregate them *as if* they were different types of items. So, my various bibliog views show only those items tagged as bibliog sources. The outline and timeline views show only those items tagged as notes.
Zotero, by contrast, seems to treat a note as an attribute of a bibliog-item. One can manipulate bibliog items through searches, sorts, etc., but notes remain slaved to bibliog items.
As such, Zotero seems great for creating annotated bibliography. But I can't figure out how I would use it to manipulate notes into the thematic and chronological patterns one needs during the writing process.
I haven't spent a lot of time playing with Zotero. If I'm misspeaking, I beg your pardon -- and would LOVE to hear how I might unleash these as-yet undiscovered note-taking functions! Assuming I'm right, though, then my feature requests would include: sorting, searching, exporting and generating reports *on notes* as independent database items.
It occurs to me (as a newbie and non-programmer) that this may not be possible due to some technical differences in the way, say, Filemaker and Firefox do databases. Is this the case? If not is something like this on the horizon for Zotero? If not, does anyone know of a single software that does a serviceable job both of automating bibliog entry and robust note manipulation of the type I describe? (I'm assuming *someone* has done this for their own individual Filemaker build. But then one lacks the excellent community problem solving that you guys have created here.)
I tend to think notes are in fact different, and need to be modeled so in the database if Zotero wants to support the kinds of features some people are calling for (such as ordering).
Please, please, please give ticket 672 higher priority. Working with both scribe and Zotero is really a pain, and the crude workaround, starting standalone (or child) notes with the page numbers (including leading zeros!! 008-014) is the kind of thing computers and software are supposed to do for users, not the other way around.
Thank you.