Upgrade StorageImporting another user's Zotero library
I recently took over the writing of a manuscript and need help importing the other user's Zotero library. I was sent her library over Outlook email and the file is in a .rdf format. Two questions:
- how do I 'import' all of their files and organization (folders) within the library?
- the manuscript is already written with headers and footers. There are a few sources that I need to add. How do I sync the bibliographies once the other user's library is uploaded into my zotero library? Or do I have to start from scratch?
- how do I 'import' all of their files and organization (folders) within the library?
- the manuscript is already written with headers and footers. There are a few sources that I need to add. How do I sync the bibliographies once the other user's library is uploaded into my zotero library? Or do I have to start from scratch?
That said,
importing the library won't do much for you -- the imported library is completely separated from the document (import/export loses links to citations in documents). You can, however, simply work with the existing Zotero document (citation data is stored internally) and add the new items from your own Zotero library and they'll be integrated into the same bibliography.
What would be hard for you to do is to correct citation information for already existing citations. It's doable, but it's laborious and error-prone, so I'd probably recommend just fixing any citations that require fixing manually at the end of the editing process.
Currently, this works best when the items were inserted from a group library that can be shared. If they were inserted from a personal library, things get a bit more tedious.
If you import via RDF, none of the items will be linked to the document anymore. You can continue to insert other items and Zotero will properly update the document based on the existing citations, but if you want to correct the metadata for any existing citations you'll need to delete and reinsert all the citations for the edited items. And if you want to insert a new citation for an existing item, you'll want to be careful to select from the "Cited" section of the citation dialog search results rather than inserting the imported items from your library. Otherwise Zotero will treat them as separate items and start disambiguating the citations according to the rules of the citation style.
We may be able to improve this — e.g., it would be nice to be able to drag items inserted from a personal library to a group library and then share the group library and the document and have the citations remain linked — but there are some tricky problems that we'll need to resolve first.