Managing large groups - reducing risk of accidental or malicious deletions
We did a live 'researchathon' and in 3 hours had 20 students create a group library with 526 items (needs a bit of de-duplication and tidying up, but mostly very good stuff). The students were so enthusiastic they want to continue adding resources and open it up to other students to add more resources.
I'm worried about the potential for someone to inadvertently or maliciously delete items or collections or to rename collections in unhelpful ways. The collection is based around 'decolonising the curriculum' so there is potential for someone who has strong views on this to delete or deface the collection and because there is not a clear audit trail of who's done what (unless I'm missing something) it would be unclear who had done it. Someone did accidentally delete a collection in the researchathon but we were able to restore it from someone's Zotero desktop that hadn't yet synced.
Has Zotero considered adding a group member status which has permission to add resources but not to delete or change the collections structure/naming? This would help reduce risk of deletion and give me more confidence to open up the group to other contributors.
Another alternative might be to enable people suggest resources for a group - where they're able to push resources through to a group collection for Admins or Editors to review and then either delete or push on into a collection.
Grateful to have feedback on this - possibilities for development or some workarounds that I've over looked.
Grant Young
(Academic Librarian for Arts and Humanities, University of East Anglia)
I'm worried about the potential for someone to inadvertently or maliciously delete items or collections or to rename collections in unhelpful ways. The collection is based around 'decolonising the curriculum' so there is potential for someone who has strong views on this to delete or deface the collection and because there is not a clear audit trail of who's done what (unless I'm missing something) it would be unclear who had done it. Someone did accidentally delete a collection in the researchathon but we were able to restore it from someone's Zotero desktop that hadn't yet synced.
Has Zotero considered adding a group member status which has permission to add resources but not to delete or change the collections structure/naming? This would help reduce risk of deletion and give me more confidence to open up the group to other contributors.
Another alternative might be to enable people suggest resources for a group - where they're able to push resources through to a group collection for Admins or Editors to review and then either delete or push on into a collection.
Grateful to have feedback on this - possibilities for development or some workarounds that I've over looked.
Grant Young
(Academic Librarian for Arts and Humanities, University of East Anglia)
The only current workaround I could think off is to have two copies of the library -- a "staging" one that's widely editable, and a final one that only a couple of people have access to. One could then have a script (e.g. python using pyzotero) that transfers new items from the one to the other that an admin can run regularly. This would obviously also allow you to restore the staging library to a previous state in case of vandalims.
There's even a privacy consideration, in that someone might save to the wrong library — or just have the group library selected and then want to move the item to a different library via the save popup — but that requires the ability to delete at least items you yourself created, at least for a period of time (but maybe not forever, lest someone delete all the items they added after they've been incorporated into the group). Could you say more about how you see that working? I think a fundamental problem here is going to be that, while one could come up with a set of restrictions that work for a particular use case, they would preclude others (like, potentially, in this example, even collaborating on adding items to collections).
For https://docs.edtechhub.org (kerko), we're using a 'group with smaller membership', which is fed from a 'group with larger membership'. To do this in one library, it would be even better to have per-collection restrictions, but that would be hard to do.
We've been working pretty hard on our command line interface for the API https://github.com/edtechhub/zotero-cli, to help us manage some aspects. On my to do list is a 'sync', where items can be synchronised from one library (e.g., items in a certain collection or with a certain tag). E.g., items could be marked by a user in libraryA; the 'superuser' runs the synscript, which adds items to library B (e.g., into an INBOX collection). At the same time, the item in library A is updated (e.g. with an attachment/link) indicating that the item has been transferred.
If somebody is interested in thinking that through together, please do let me know, and we can work out what's possible.