Upgrade StorageSearching across all group libraries
Dear all,
We have several folders in the Group Libraries (one for the students, one of the research group, and so on) and we need to be able to search across all of them. How do you do that?
Regards,
--
Corrado Topi
Stockholm Environment Institute
University of York
We have several folders in the Group Libraries (one for the students, one of the research group, and so on) and we need to be able to search across all of them. How do you do that?
Regards,
--
Corrado Topi
Stockholm Environment Institute
University of York
I believe allowing cross-library search is still planned, but it poses non-trivial GUI issues, so I wouldn't expect it to happen very soon.
As a question/suggestion from someone without any programming skills:
Would it be possible to leave the search term in the search field active as you click through your various libraries?
Right now, once you highlight another library, the term in the search field disappears and you need to re-type it (or copy once and then re-paste it for each library) to repeat the search in another library; which is a bit cumbersome. If the search term would stay "alive", one could relatively quickly search through numerous libraries by clicking on them one by one.
Not as a total solution, but I think this might make things easier and much quicker.
Thanks for all your great work with Zotero!!
I will support the importance of the feature "searching accross multiple (Group-Libraries)".
My scenario is similar to that of Corrado. I have beside my own library a lot of group libraries, where I share subtopics of my lib with a special research subgroups. Often I have the task, to find duplicates across multiple libs to unify them by hand or I know to have read an article - but I do not find it without searching all groups and my lib by hand. These tasks could be simplified by an "across all group" search.
I have seen in the advanced search window, that there is a library-selector already implemented. But at the moment there is no selector-entry for "search in all libs".
I have a suggestion for an easy realisation of this "multi-lib" search. We need in my opinion only two things:
First we need a simple check-box beside the search field, to enhance the search database to "all libs". Checking it will expand the search on all libs (my lib and all group libs). Not checking the box will restrict the search to the current active lib only (as it is implemented at the moment).
Second we need an additional column in the mid-pane (where the results are shown), which indicates the name of the library for every entry.
Otherwise the "work around" from schibones could also be usefull to simplify these tasks.
For those of us who do collaborative research - and I would sincerely hope that is more and more of us - such functionality would save us SO much time. I have over 100 group libraries, each of them with multiple sub-libraries, many of them with multiple members. I now often resort to re-entering items instead of finding existing ones that I know are in another group library, just because I know that will take much longer. But so this leads to a lot of (unnecessarily) duplicated ones AND to wasted time...
It's important to keep things in perspective. Having 100s group libraries is far outside the norm. As far as I am aware, I am in the high range of number of groups, and I am a member of only around 20.
https://www.cogsci.nl/qnotero
Also - aren't there any other other programs out there that are not Zotero-specific, but that just allow you to do (hopefully also advanced) searches on various fields of the sqlite file?
[And I take Sebastian's word for it, that such a more global search option across our (offline OR online) libraries poses various GUI and/or website problems, but it still seems to me that these should not be insuperable...]
Can't say what's not working about Qnotero, though. You're positive it's looking in the right place? Documentation is sparse simply because there isn't much to document. It sits in your system tray, you search, it finds.
Admittedly - I have a fairly large library (32 gigs). Could that be the problem? Also - how does qnotero actually work? Does it re-index things? Could that take a long time? Is it fully integrated into Zotero - i.e. does it 'take over' Zotero search; or does it only work in its own interface?
Will modify QNotero python code to adapt it to Z5 whenever I have time following @adamsmith
I strongly endorse @danmichaelo 's idea - which from the earlier discussion looks like it would be trivial to implement:
"UI idea: ...add cross-library search to advanced search by adding "All libraries" to the "Search in library" list in Advanced Search."
The GUI issue is more about the display of results than the search: How do you show the search results and the libraries they belong to. This isn't insurmountable by any means, but it's more than just adding a button.
Indeed, if there was a root All Libraries icon shown in the left pane, users wouldn't even need to open Advanced Search to do their global searches. Sounds like a pretty straightforward enhancement, no?
Honestly, it's really not worth discussing this very much. Everyone is convinced that this needs to happen, so no disagreement there, and you are not going to convince any of the devs that this is a completely trivial change.
You could consider creating a group (with only one member, you) or use your My Library as a place to store a copy of all items in all groups. That is, create your own superset that is only useful for searching. Obviously, it has it's own overhead, but if you often need to do searches across groups, this will still save you significant time. You can drag-drop new items from each group in to this superset group, maybe once a week or daily. The time saved is going to be a function of how many groups you have and how often you search these groups for an article.
Note that the superset is only to answer the question if an article exists in any group/s. Your main article is still going to be the one in the origin group (since groups do not sync between themselves to keep an entry up to date). And you might not be able to tell the source group for an article found in the superset (or you could if you tag items in a group with the group name).
I am not sure if you try to copy the an item that exists in multiple groups, will the superset have multiple copies or it will prevent none but the first copied item to exist.
I thought I'd just add my support for minimally the feature of a checkbox (like e.g. Thunderbird has in its quicksearch feature) which, if you check it, would let the search term be 'sticky', so that if you've already typed it in and then switch to another library, the search terms you'd already typed would still be there. Not sure if this is as difficult to implement GUI-wise as the request of a single search that at once checks multiple libraries – but just in case it's easier, it would be incredibly helpful and less tedious. Many thanks again!