Feature request: connected edited volumes and their chapters

Apologies if this came up somewhere already or is a feature already.

Situation: Many libraries contain both edited volumes as well as chapters included in these volumes. The edited volume is typically item type: book; the chapters are book section item types.

Feature: automatically linking edited volume (books) to their chapters (book sections) and vice versa. In UI: Could be an automatic entry in "related" tab. Or edited volumes could have link to book section as a "virtual" child item (like a symbolic link).

Use: Ease of navigating large libraries. I have PDFs of edited volumes as attachments in their edited volumes and would like to navigate from chapter entries in my library to the item with the PDF attachment.

Low priority, but maybe nice to have.

Thanks.
  • FWIW, he related item link is already auto-created when you use the "Create Book Section" option on an edited volume to generate the chapter citations.
    You're suggesting also adding this automatically based on metadata?

    There are many discussions with more ambitious proposals that'd properly capture hierarchical relationships going back to basically Zotero 1.0 (some of them including Zotero leadership) -- my sense is that the Zotero team is treating this as too little pay-off for the massive work of restructuring the database to allow that, but I've not seen anything official on this for at least a decade.
  • Thanks. See, I never noticed the "Create Book Section" option.

    But, yes, I think it would be mildly useful to have some kind of link also automatically created via metadata.

    For an UI idea: Take Zotero on iPad OS. Consider the item info of a book section. As for all items, iirc, a user needs to click "edit" to edit the info of an item. So the item info that is displayed for a book section could link (via tap on book title for example) to the "parent" book item. So for all book sections, when Zotero finds a "parent" book, a tap on the book title (and/or editors) in the iPadOS app opens the "parent" book item.
  • @adamsmith: I have tried to find the "create book section" option everywhere. I have also looked at the documentation page "https://www.zotero.org/support/adding_items_to_zotero" , "https://www.zotero.org/support/related" and https://www.zotero.org/support/tips_and_tricks and could find nothing. It sounds like a great tool, but where is it? And can someone please add this to the documentation?
  • It's in the right-click menu for clicking on a book in the middle panel. Screenshot here: https://i.imgur.com/J35yRKD.png
  • ah, fantastic! This should be added to documentation, either the section on "adding items to zotero" or to "tips and tricks "
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