Just adding that I personally now just use an indexer (in my case the quite powerful dtsearch) to find things back in my storage folders. It's a pain, but for the time being it's the only way for me to find things back across my 150 groups...
Desperately need this feature. It makes Group Libraries a total waste if I need to search within all of them for one thing. I too support the development of this feature
This is really an incredibly frustrating thing to have missing. I end up regularly copying collections from group libraries to my personal libraries, and the reverse, because it's too cumbersome to try to figure out which group library might have the citations I need when working on a project. Since I store the PDFs for nearly all of my citations, this means I'm substantially increasing the amount of storage I'm consuming. If I could leave them in the group libraries, and still be able to search for them, it would be enormously helpful.
Working on multiple projects with different groups, creating separate libraries are very convenient. However, as many has suggested above, this raise a number of challenges. To be able to search across libraries could be a solution, but I would appreciate an alternative solution, which would be that the Group Libraries in reality became connected to My Library in ways similar to how Collections are organised in the individual Libraries, or rather: that I could give access/share specific collections in my own library. In this way I would avoid doublets of articles which potentially would contain different notes.
To me this solution becomes even more attractive because when I close a project, then I want to pull back the project Group Library as a collection in My Library
Clearly, the flip-side would be that a hostile or clumsy partner could damage my library. But this is not different from how i.e., one-drive works: I can choose which directories (=libraries) to share, and if someone messes things up, then I can undo the mess (90 days back).
Howdy, it's getting rather hectic in my 'Library' with a bazillion folders, it'd be great to be able to create numerous Library collections (with an editable name) and be able to search all of them at once. I'd gladly pay for that privilege.
**edit: I didn't realise I could use subfolders. Looking much neater now. User-error wins again!
Also need this feature. If I forget which library a given pdf if saved in, it would be very difficult to find it in zotero even if I have the name of the pdf.
Hi, +1 for sticky search and the search across group libraries. Spent 15 minutes confused why I didn't have the paper I had cited in my zotero library and i had to search group libraries (10+) one by one to find the paper I was looking for. This makes group libraries much less useful and less likely to be adopted by my colleagues. Thank you!
this feature is needed badly for my case because I have around 10 libraries (which may have common files or not), making it very difficult to retrieve an item.
BTW, I would also request offering a way to retrieve the collection information for a pdf stored in the database. For example, I may want to find a paper in zotero, but only remembers its file name (which is not necessarily the paper title), then, when I found such a file in one of the folders of zotero, I can't find which library/collection it is actually stored in zotero.
I have a suggestion for an "easy" workaround/little helper. What if switching the library does not delete the search string? In this way, you could spare the copy-paste /rewriting effort when searching one item over multiple libraries. By the way, is there actually a way to donate/fund you guys in a way that the community supports the development?
Another thought in terms of workarounds/possibly smaller fixes. Would it be possible to adapt the Word Add-in to work as a small program (with only its search and Open In functionality) that lived in the Systems Tray (for Windows - not sure what the equivalent is for Mac/Linux)? There was previously a program like that (Qnotero) but it is no longer updated.
Pushing this once more. I was really hoping to see this in 7 beta, but I did't find it, only filtering collections. Anybody here who has an Idea how to search across libraries that works within zotero? PLEASE it is one major thing that keeps my coworkers from using it and Zotero becoming the standard in our team.
Upgrade Storage
Also adding thanks for this software, which is really quite good.
In the meantime, I use the Word Add-in to search across libraries, using the "Open in..." option to then find/read the paper I'm looking for.
To me this solution becomes even more attractive because when I close a project, then I want to pull back the project Group Library as a collection in My Library
Clearly, the flip-side would be that a hostile or clumsy partner could damage my library. But this is not different from how i.e., one-drive works: I can choose which directories (=libraries) to share, and if someone messes things up, then I can undo the mess (90 days back).
**edit: I didn't realise I could use subfolders. Looking much neater now. User-error wins again!
Thank you!
BTW, I would also request offering a way to retrieve the collection information for a pdf stored in the database. For example, I may want to find a paper in zotero, but only remembers its file name (which is not necessarily the paper title), then, when I found such a file in one of the folders of zotero, I can't find which library/collection it is actually stored in zotero.