Read vs unread & adding specific dates

BHoyer
When I have read a book (or seen a film) I would like to add the month + year in which I read it (or saw it) to my Zotera record of that book (or film). How do I do this? Ideally, I would like to be able to search for all books and films that I read / saw within a particular month or create a timeline specifically for this. Needless to say, the date of reading the book is NOT necessarily the same as the date of publication, or the date that I added or modified the record in Zotero. (Also, I want to add books to Zotero that I haven't read, yet. But these shouldn't come up in a search for, say, "books I have read May-June 2013".)
Thanks in advance for suggestions!
  • adamsmith
    there is no good way to do that, sorry. Obviously you can use other fields or notes for dates, but these aren't recognized as dates so you can't sort by them, let alone define ranges.
  • hwileniu
    I was thinking about this today, and stumbled on this via Google.

    One workaround I came up with is to create a separate collection for the reading diary, add a stand-alone note every time I've read or watched something, and use the related items functionality to link to the proper record of the item. Not very handy, I know, but now if I make a timeline, select Date type as Date added, it works.

    I'd like to use tags for filtering the timeline, but apparently the timeline filters only match for the name of the item. (At least with stand-alone notes.) Any ideas for a workaround? I'd not like to use tags within note names, and if I use subcollections, apparently the timeline made from the parent collection does not include the items in the subcollections.
  • bwiernik
    edited May 8, 2014
    What about using the field "Accessed" (located below URL). Yes, this field is typically used to indicate the date that you downloaded the reference from the database, but it would work for your situation (it is recognized as a date), so long as you don't need to reference the Access date in you bibliographies.
  • hwileniu
    Hmm, the Accessed field is only for snapshots, right? How I set it up was using stand-alone notes, so I don't have that field I think. But based on my tests, the timeline filters only check against the Title field, so that wouldn't work.
  • bwiernik
    The accessed field is part of every Zotero item (not attachments, snapshots, or notes). So, in the main entry for the book, you can indicate when you "Accessed"/read the book, then used "Accessed" as the date in Timeline.
  • hwileniu
    Yeah, I figured that out, but I didn't manage to sort things in the timeline based on the Accessed field. That would be a trivial change in the code though, and it would make my workaround with the notes unnecessary.
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