Realistic Batch Edit Timeline?

benjaminsiegel
Hi Zotero team,

Have loved Zotero for many years, and couldn't imagine having to work without it. Thanks for all your hard work. A question: when, realistically, can we expect batch editing of fields in Zotero? I have seen it listed in the development pipeline for years at this point, and know that it must be something that others are eagerly anticipating. For my part, I sometimes import a few hundred archival documents (as PDFs or JPGs) at one go, and would love to be able to say, add the name of the archive / library or the box number in one go, as opposed to having to copy and paste a few hundred at a time.

Is there a realistic estimate of when this feature might finally be in Zotero? Or workarounds that do not require learning Python, etc? (I am a computer savvy historian, but not that computer savvy.)
  • adamsmith
    I think the reason there are no public roadmaps/timelines is that they've just proven to be too unreliable to be "realistic", so I don't think you'll get something on that.

    For newly imported items, I think exporting, modifying in a text editor, and then re-importing may serve as a workaround. That's not lossless and it'll break any existing citations, so it'll work best if you're looking at newly added items that don't have much in terms of metadata anyway.

    FWIW, a python script that allows you just add some basic string in a given field for all items in, say, a given collection, wouldn't be terribly hard to write and, perhaps more importantly, to set up in a way that even if you didn't write the script, you can modify it to adapt to tasks without any programming knowledge.
  • benjaminsiegel
    @adamsmith Thanks so much for this! Completely understand on the first point. My own timelines are subject to pretty substantive revisions, in any case.

    You're talking about exporting the files alongside an RDF file, then editing that file within a text editor, right? That's a good idea; thank you.

    And is PyZotero the place to look on that second point?
  • bwiernik
    Yes, Pyzotero is the place to look for existing batch edit capabilities.
  • adamsmith
    Yes, on export -- could be RDF (which has the advantage of being mostly lossless) or could be something simpler like RIS or bibtex/biblatex (which have the advantage of being much easier to understand&modify.)
  • fbennett
    Is https://tropy.org relevant to such a workflow?
  • benjaminsiegel
    @fbennett, I tried to figure that out just now, having noticed some blog posts on the software lately. Its tagging interface is excellent -- I can take the "raw" photos from the archive and quickly identify individual items, etc. But in an ideal universe, I'd be able to export these neatly with their metadata intact (as PDFs?), and then reimport them into Zotero nicely processed. If you have a different sense of how Tropy might fit in, please let me know -- it, like Zotero, is a lovely effort.
  • fbennett
    That was a shot in the dark -- I hadn't used Tropy, only read of it. Good to know it's in the ballpark. There should be an export/import path to Zotero -- they're built by the same lab, and there is some staffing overlap.
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