Upgrade StorageImproving group libraries: see who added what and whether items exists in my local library
In the middle of some serious publication projects involving Group libraries I keep bumping into some limitations of the groups functionality in the client. I will highlight two here.
1. Seeing who added what.
Possibly one of the most important things about collaborating is that you get to see and read stuff you didn't find yourself. Yet to do so, it is crucial that you can see who added what. I have added 40 refs, a colleague another 10. I cannot show which ones are mine and which ones were added by my colleague.
Proposal: in the Zotero client, add a column "added by" to group libraries and enable its display by default. This is already in the web interface but nobody wants to go there and its display in the client is far more relevant.
2. Seeing whether items exist locally.
Collaborations are usually more transient than personal libraries. Many items don't just belong in the group library I'm using for this collaboration, but are important enough to be in my personal library.
Proposal: Provide some display of whether items exist locally or not. A first pass would be to show items that originated in my library (which still have the mysterious linkage), but it would also be necessary to detect duplicates and say of these that they exist locally. This seems to hinge on improvements to the duplicate detection algorithms that are necessary anyway.
These proposals are ranked in order of importance. The first is essential (indeed it is somewhat surprising that it's not here yet, given how long it has existed in the (for other reasons unusable) web interface) and given the amount of requests for it on the forums). The second becomes less of a pain if the first is implemented, but it is an important one to have on the horizon.
1. Seeing who added what.
Possibly one of the most important things about collaborating is that you get to see and read stuff you didn't find yourself. Yet to do so, it is crucial that you can see who added what. I have added 40 refs, a colleague another 10. I cannot show which ones are mine and which ones were added by my colleague.
Proposal: in the Zotero client, add a column "added by" to group libraries and enable its display by default. This is already in the web interface but nobody wants to go there and its display in the client is far more relevant.
2. Seeing whether items exist locally.
Collaborations are usually more transient than personal libraries. Many items don't just belong in the group library I'm using for this collaboration, but are important enough to be in my personal library.
Proposal: Provide some display of whether items exist locally or not. A first pass would be to show items that originated in my library (which still have the mysterious linkage), but it would also be necessary to detect duplicates and say of these that they exist locally. This seems to hinge on improvements to the duplicate detection algorithms that are necessary anyway.
These proposals are ranked in order of importance. The first is essential (indeed it is somewhat surprising that it's not here yet, given how long it has existed in the (for other reasons unusable) web interface) and given the amount of requests for it on the forums). The second becomes less of a pain if the first is implemented, but it is an important one to have on the horizon.
This should probably use the same mechanism as the collections-containing-an-item feature and/or expanded related items functionality.
My main goal, just so you know where I'm coming from, was to solve the problem that Group libraries used for collaboration are more transient than personal libraries. So we need ways to easily copy all new stuff (but not duplicates) from Group to personal. Right now that is far from trivial. Your suggestions to borrow the logic from the collections-contaning-an-item and/or related items make sense.
for me your two suggested improvements for group library usage are exactly that, what I need to have, too.
At the moment I use a workaround for "added by" that every contributor has to use a special tag, like ">addby>SiGi" to mark his contributions.
Your second improvment proposal to handle identical items in the group and own local library is for me a serious problem too. In my workflow it happens often that I copy items (including tags, notes, attachements) to one or more group libraries. Now I have 2 or more independent copies of the same item - and all of them advance independently (added tags, notes, ..). At the moment it is very difficult to gather the whole information for an item spread over different libraries.
To track the distributing of my items into different groups I use at the moment a (not really good) workaround: I have a collection in my local library for each group library and place there every item, I copy from my library to the group library.
It would be nice, if there will be a more advanced way to keep track of identical items over multiple group libraries.
Thanks, SiGi
In my own collection I have my own, somewhat loose, rules for Tags, that are convenient to me, but probably not very useful for somebody else. At the same time one of the groups that I am in there has strict conventions on tags keywords.
It would be convenient to easily find back the papers I added to the group so that I can bring them up to Group standards.