Difference between "My Library" and "Group Library"

circ-publications
I have a library for my account that has been setup as a Group. I have had a problem that I cannot get BibBase to pull in all the records from my group library (N=340). I have been racking my brain and I just discovered that the "My Library" account the group is set up for only has 283 records.

Why the discrepancy? How do I reconcile this so they are both match?
  • bwiernik
    My Library and any Group Libraries are completely independent. Items in My Library are unique and not the same as items in any Group Library. You apparently had previously copied some (but not all) items from My Library to the Group Library.

    I'm not familiar with BibBase. Can you describe exactly what you are trying to do here?
  • circ-publications
    I have a Zotero 'user' account called "circ-publications". I have shared it as a 'group' account called "ArcticCIRC" to researchers in my centre. I have noticed that when I look at the listing of citations for the 'user' account (N=283) it is less than that of the 'group' account (N=340).

    If a group member adds a publication to the group, why does it not update the user account?

    BibBase.org is a tool that generates scripts that query the Zotero API and creates visually and functionally stunning bibliographies on websites. For example, https://www.arcticcirc.net/publications/.

    The problem is that BibBase queries the 'user' account so I only get a subset of the publications for the group.

    I realize that the group is actually two (or more) 'users', "circ-publications" and the other individual group members!

    Is there a way to allow all members to update a single account or am I going about this the wrong way!
  • bwiernik
    You seem to be misunderstanding how Groups work. Each user account has its own personal My Library that only they can access. A user may also be a member of one or more Groups. Each Group has its own library that is completely separate from any member's personal My Library or any other Group library. When you make the Group library "ArticleCIRC", you aren't "sharing" the personal My Library from your "circ-publications" account, you are creating a separate library that all other group members can access.

    The best way to handle this would be to contact the BibBase developer and inquire as to how to set the visualisation to use a specified Group library, rather than a user's personal My Library.

    The alternative would be to share the login details for the circ-publications account with everyone who will be editing the library for the web page. But that type of setup would potentially introduce a lot of other headaches depending on how each person is using Zotero.
  • bwiernik
    See here for additional information on how to use Group Libraries:
    https://www.zotero.org/support/groups

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