Standard library nodes/auto-collections

tzybura
Large collections can become difficult to browse, which can’t always be ameliorated by search or collections.

Customizable automatic library nodes would be handy. These nodes would be like ready-made collections in the left-hand library panel: Author, Date, Publisher, Date Added, Title (by first letter), ... any field could be chosen, really. A preference dialog could provide checkboxes to choose which auto-collections should be displayed. An individual folder icon (blue instead of yellow or so) highlights them.

It would look like this (underscores instead of blanks used because blanks at the beginning of line are deleted by forum software -.-):

MyLibrary
[+] My personal collection x
[+] My personal collection y
[-] Author (auto-collection)
____[+] Asimov, Isaac
____[+] Atwood, Margaret
____[+] Bacigalupi, Paolo
____[+] Cherryh, C.J.
____[+] ...
[-] Date (auto-collection)
____[+] 2009
____[+] 1978
____[+] ...

It should be possible to add these auto-collections to personal collections and subcollections (via drag-and-drop or right-click menu), so that I can easily browse e.g. the list of authors contained in the collection rather than having to scroll through long lists of works by some authors just to find another author with only one entry in between.

Zotero is awesome, but that addition would make it even more so.
  • dstillman
    It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure why simply sorting by the desired column in the middle pane isn't sufficient. The main difference, I think, is that you don't get an updated tag selector view, but that doesn't justify the feature in my mind.
  • tzybura
    That is not the main difference, IMO. Imagine in the above example that you have fiftytwo titles by Isaac Asimov, 10 by Margaret Atwood, thirtyseven by C.J. Cherryh, and so forth with dozens, if not hundreds, of different authors and again hundreds of titles between them. The middle pane in that case is extremely crowded with no easy way of gaining an overview of its content, especially the collected authors.
  • dstillman
    edited July 19, 2014
    with no easy way of gaining an overview of its content, especially the collected authors
    How do you not have that by sorting by Creator?
  • tzybura
    That’s what I tried to explain by the above example. I’ll try another way:

    On my 22" screen the middle pane shows 47 individual titles; so, often enough, not even all titles by one author fit into the pane. To get an overview of all authors whose names start with A I already have to scroll quite a bit. Extensive scrolling—to me—is the antithesis of gaining an overview. Having auto-nodes in the left-hand tree would greatly alleviate that.

    (These kinds of nodes, in my experience, are common enough features of music library software, which also operate with complex ID tagging (e.g. MediaMonkey if you want a reference). They were basically the first thing I missed in Zotero, apart from more powerful tag management.)
  • dstillman
    edited July 19, 2014
    Oh, you mean an overview of the authors, not their works. That's true — you don't get that in the middle pane.

    I've actually long thought about a virtual creators collection that would list all creators in the middle pane as parent items, expandable to show all the items associated with them, but your suggested approach is actually better in a number of ways. (It would take a lot of work to have the middle pane support things other than items, the tag selector wouldn't do what you want, you couldn't do it for arbitrary collections, and you'd have the problem of what to do in the column headers with two different types of data in the tree.)

    Want to think about this some more, though.
  • tzybura
    edited July 19, 2014
    Yes, I also thought about expendable/collapsible creator items in the middle pane at first, but figured that it would be contrary to the current systematic.

    Looking forward to see what you think up. :)
  • zuphilip
    I assume that for books with more than one author this would show up in several author-collections. The same would not be possible with an ordering.

    I know a similar feature in Citavi for lists of tags, persons and institutions, publishers, series etc. There it is also possible to modify fields consistently, e.g. rename all entries associated to "Asimov, I." into "Asimov, Isaac" and therefore merge these two collections. Especially to normalize publisher information this can be handy.
  • aurimas
    edited July 20, 2014
    What I would envision is filters similar to what you see when you browse Amazon or any other shopping site. You would have multiple categories to filter by (first author or just author, publication year, publisher, container title, item type, etc.) and you could see how many items are in each category. The one issue with this is UI placement. I would add a tab interface above the current collection tree, where you could switch to filter display instead of collection view. Or, maybe, create collapsible sections in the current left hand pane (effectively same as tabs. I'll have to look for an example, since I doubt think I can describe it properly).
  • dstillman
    edited July 20, 2014
    "Facets", that would be.

    The problem with a tab — or some sort of alternative view that you switch to — is that it becomes awkward to still be within a specific library/collection, or to switch to a different one. (It could give some context at the top, but you'd still have to switch back to the other view to switch collections.)

    What about another collapsible pane above the tag selector? Then the context remains clear and you can still easily switch collections, and the facets would update just like the tag selector (which is actually a faceted search itself) as you did so.
  • aurimas
    Right, that's the kind of collapsible pane I was thinking of, but I don't think we have enough vertical space to display the facets and comfortably browse collections. You would still end up collapsing between one and the other and I feel like it's much easier to switch with tabs than collapsible panes. One of the facets could be "subcollections", which could also display parent collections, so you could easily navigate up and down the tree, just not sideways.
  • dstillman
    edited July 20, 2014
    but I don't think we have enough vertical space to display the facets and comfortably browse collections
    I disagree. It might be tight in an unexpanded Zotero for Firefox pane on a laptop, but in Standalone or in an expanded view in Firefox I think there'd be plenty of room. And if you don't have much height to work with, you could always hide the tag selector or hide all but a few lines of the collections view.

    Doing it that way seems both logical — collections -> facets -> tags — and consistent with the tag selector.

    We'd probably need to add a button to toggle the facets pane, though.
    One of the facets could be "subcollections", which could also display parent collections
    That doesn't really make sense to me. The facets are item properties. Subcollections aren't item properties, since they can exist even when there are no items.
  • dstillman
    edited July 21, 2014
    I also don't like the idea of facets being active when you're not viewing them (which is why the tag selector is cleared when it's closed), so I think it's important to be able to interact with the facets while you're browsing the collection tree. (If a facet is still valid when switching collections, it should stay selected.) With a tab, you'd lose the faceted search if you switched back to the collection view for a second. (It could remember your previous facet and reselect it if it was still valid when you switched back to the facets view, but it'd still have to revert to an unfaceted search while you were switching collections.)
  • bwiernik
    Why would a tabbed view hide the collections? I would imagine that the tabs would span the center pane--the first tab being all items, the other tabs listing the facets. I imagine that, when tags or collections are selected, the facets would filter the items within the selected collections/tags.

    Or am I misunderstanding what aurimas was describing?
  • aurimas
    @bwiernik, I was referring to the collection pane, since I think that would be less inconvenient than center pane (if you want to apply more than one filter, wouldn't you want to see the items after each application?)
    One of the facets could be "subcollections", which could also display parent collections

    That doesn't really make sense to me. The facets are item properties. Subcollections aren't item properties, since they can exist even when there are no items.
    I was going with the analogy of shopping websites, where you can progressively narrow down categories by selecting a sub-category, or going up a category (even though items could belong to a number of categories). I think that subcollections _are_ item properties (as far as properties go, they're no different from tags) and in the same way that tags are filtered out by already-selected tags, you would only display collections that are subcollections of the currently selected one and only sub-collections that apply to visible items. I don't think that empty collections have any influence on the facet display. I do see how this might not make sense if you do not use recursive collections, so this facet could be conditional on that setting.
    I also don't like the idea of facets being active when you're not viewing them (which is why the tag selector is cleared when it's closed), so I think it's important to be able to interact with the facets while you're browsing the collection tree.
    I can see your point, but I still think that adding a third sub-pane to the left hand pane will make it too cluttered (facets would need a good amount of vertical space).

    Going with the tabbed idea and the issue of facets being applied while not visible, what if the currently applied facets were visible right above the middle pane in a similar fashion as filters? Similar to this but with a way to remove the filters (say, an (x) next to each). This way, the facets could remain applied when switching collections and it would be obvious that they are applied.
  • zuphilip
    Personally, I don't care that much about the user interface, because I am sure you will go for best user experience:) I am more concerned about functionalities here. As I described above, a really nice functionality IMO is to merge two entries in an automatic list and therefore perform a batch edit in the background. In Citavi this looks like this.
  • aurimas
    The action in the screenshot, does that replace the tag your're dragging, or take all items associated with that tag and also assign the destination tag?
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