Upgrade StorageSeries Number not available as Column Heading
I may be missing something, as a novice but... in the centre of the main screen displaying records, I have Title and Creator ticked, fine. However, as I am entering items from a large numbered series of books, it would be very useful to have the "Series Number" field visible, and to sort by. But it is simply not in the list, not even in "More Columns > ". Is there something I (as an inexperienced user) can do to put this right? Comprehensible suggestions extremely welcome!
Many thanks, Martin
Many thanks, Martin
Perhaps I have misunderstood the meaning of the fields. I am entering several hundred items, probably thousands eventually, in the broad subject area of published Sanskrit scriptures. There are a number of different "Series", (as they call themselves), each with a hundred or more distinct titles. So, I am currently working on the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies, or KSTS for short. I put KSTS as the entry for "Series" (to distinguish it, say, from the Chowkambha Series of Sanskrit Texts, CSST). Individual KSTS publications then have a Title, but also, crucially, a Series Number, KSTS1 through to KSTS90. Within this Series, there are many instances, when a large work is published in several volumes, each with a separate KSTS number. So, eg, there is Tantraloka Volume 1, which is KSTS23, Tantraloka Volume 2, which is KSTS28, and so on. Therefore I am also using the Volume field, but its meaning is quite different from the Series Number field.
So for me, sorting by Series Number is essential. I could, and probably will have to, use a work-around, of double-entering the Series Number into a field I am not using, but that's really clunky.
Also, why does "Series Title" show up as a sortable column heading, distinct for "Series"? It doesn't even seem to be a field you can use! Or am I I missing something really massive here, like how users can customise these system lists? As it is, it looks like there is a programmed mismatch between the list of fields supplied for data entry, and the pull-down list of fields supplied for column heads, and thus sorting.
I do take your point about it being a secondary sort field. Yes, that's quite right; Series Number would need to be in both, I would have thought.
Sorry this is so long, but a problem can only be solved if first defined.
Martin Williams
1. Series number as a column for series with lots of seperate titles does make sense (I used it often in my previous tool 'Endnote', but now I switched completely to Zotero, and I'm really missing this option)
2. And by trying to show/hode columns I stumbled on the same question about "Series" and "Series Title". In my case is the second indeed empty after import form Endnote, and I don't see it either in the lst of fields to fill when adding a book, nort when looking at an item.
Thanks for helping me (or us) out.
Erik
I would like to flag that this is still an issue for me, indeed, a major one.
It seems to me that the ideal which should be the aspiration is very simple and clear: every field which exists in Zotero should be
(a) displayable as a column, and
(b) the entire view should be sortable by any column.
I do realise that is easier to state than to realise, but surely it is a self-evident aspiration. It should not be the developer's aim to pre-determine what is possible (that is merely an inevitable outcome); the developer's aim is to make the system maximally flexible-and-robust, so that it can cope with all the new, undreamed-of creative ways of using it, that the developers haven't even imagined. Well, that's what I think, anyway.
While I'm here, a quick "thank you" to everyone who has worked on this undertaking - it's fantastic, I really appreciate it, it has transformed my working life - just so's you know.
Martin