Advice/thoughts on assigning items to multiple collections?

v4u6h4n
I generally just assign items to a single collection, but I'm wondering if I would benefit from assigning items to multiple collections sometimes. Just curious what other people do?
  • tim820
    edited today at 2:02am
    There are no right or wrong answers to library organization questions. You have to decide what approach works best for the knowledge domains in which you work. And what makes intuitive sense to you. Just make sure you understand how the Zotero collections model works.
    https://www.zotero.org/support/collections_and_tags#the_zotero_collections_model

    My scheme has top-level/parent collections that cover my major, broad areas of interest. And *every* new item goes into one of those. But usually not more than one, because my interests are distinct enough that there is not much overlap (YMMV).

    Then I have narrower-topic subcollections under those broad parent collections, and mostly only one level of those, but sometimes two (I do have a few subcollections 4-levels deep). Subcollections get created whenever I need to focus on a sub-topic. I add important work from the top level collection to that subcollection, so that it lives in both. That is also the level at which some items might exist in more than one subcollection.

    As every item in a sub-topic subcollection also lives its parent collection, I have never used View\Show Items from Subcollections. To my mind that would just create confusion as to which collections an item really belongs to. It also means that if a sub-collection outlives its usefulness, I can delete it knowing that the items it contains will remain categorized by their parent collection membership.

    I also make heavy use of (manual) tags and saved searches.
  • v4u6h4n
    Interesting. I'm thinking I might stick to my current approach, except for in cases when a work is notably multidisciplinary.

    I haven't used the saved search feature so far actually. What do you find yourself using it for?
  • tim820
    I use saved searches for a number of things that I would otherwise be manually re-entering advanced search terms for often ...

    - key authors/research groups whose work I often need to look at
    - key topics that are find-able in more than one way (tags, text content, title content)
    - work in particular journals or from particular web sites
    - 'housekeeping' searches (items with tags, items with no tags, standalone notes, videos, html files, images, different languages)

    I prefix all the 'non-author' search names with an underscore, so they appear at the top of the saved searches list, with all the author searches at the bottom.
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