Hi,
I don't think it's possible to put a note in a collection without detaching it from its parent item.

However, you could try tagging all of the relevant notes (as opposed to their parent items) with a tag for the topic. Once you have done that, you could use Advanced Search to locate all of the items with the topic tag, and then save that search. This will give you a folder in the Collections pane. When you open that folder, you will see all of the notes in black text; the parent items and other attachments will be visible but grayed out.

Unlike a collections folder, this Saved Search folder will update automatically when you add a new note with the topic tag.

There is a place to add tags to notes at the bottom of the third pane when you have selected the note, just above the "Edit in a separate window" button.

I'm not sure that it's possible to distinguish between tags on notes and other tags when using Advanced Search. Maybe there is, but if not you'd want to make your topic tags quite specific so that they would differ from the tags that get imported automatically when items are imported from library catalogs. Otherwise, you'd see those items as well in your saved search folder, which may or may not be useful for you.

Hmm, I don't know that it's possible to display notes only in the search results. Maybe there is a way, but I'm thinking it would need to be coded in, like the "Only show top-level items" option.

I seem to remember that it will become possible to export notes only when the feature for customizing reports is added, though.

awowwed--Can you explain why you need child notes in collections by themselves? The way the interface is set up now, if you added a child note without its parent to a collection you wouldn't be able to tell in the middle pane what sources the notes are attached to, which would make the view pretty much useless.

I add a web page that if printed might be 50 pages long. Within this page are paragraphs that pertain to several different collections.

I understand your thinking here, but you're asking Zotero to do what it is not really designed to do in my view. The Zotero model deals with resources (typically documents); not parts of resources.

So notes always belong to the resource they are attached to. It would no sense at all for them not to be. If you want them in different collections, then move the resource (with associated notes) to those collections.

Now, that may not be the best long term answer, so WRT to ...

What I want to do (I think a fairly natural thing) is be able to highlight paragraph 3, right click and save it as a child note.

Why do you need to save the content as a child note, when you could just use the annotation support?

In any case, saving an excerpt as a note is different than the notes I take on that same content. We've discussed this before on the forums.

(In my opinion that note should also include information linking it back to the specific paragraph to which it refers.

Which is exactly what the annotation support does.

Otherwise, I might have 30 notes on the document but not know [or be able to cite] where it came from.) After I have my 30 notes, I then might want to relate note 3 to collection 4 and note 12 to collection 6, etc., because the whole document does not pertain to any specific collection, only parts of it. Does this make sense?

Well, sort of, except that I have the hunch you're conflating a bunch of different issues (and I haven't quite figured out how to explain them). One is that you want to be able to describe the context to which a note applies. This has come up before, but I don't think this is trivial from a data modeling or UI standpoint. Merely saying you should be able to move child notes around is really not a solution, as I believe it would likely have a variety of unintended consequences.

Try starting each note with the paragraph number, adding zeros to small numbers to sort correctly, i.e. [02], [04], [10]. You can add "par" to distinguish from page numbers--[02] for page 2, [02 par] for paragraph 2.

I shouldn't have to do this. What researcher would make a note on a 3x5 card without noting the citation information (resource name, vol, page/paragraph, etc.) on the card along with the note or quote? Going back to Zotero's claim/metaphor--that it is a replacement for a 3x5 index card--if notes are attached to a resource and Zotero is to supposed to automate this process, then Zotero should keep track of which paragraph or page the note is associated with. The association should be automatic and that information should "travel" with the note as I associate it with a collection.

So notes always belong to the resource they are attached to. It would no sense at all for them not to be. If you want them in different collections, then move the resource (with associated notes) to those collections.

If you have a collection on gender, and your parent item is a book on baseball that includes three paragraphs on gender, it makes no sense to move the entire parent item, and it would be especially confusing if it has 10 or more child notes on topics that have nothing to do with gender. In a saved search, it would be clear which one of the 11 notes is relevant.

This is exactly my point. The note belongs associated with the parent resource, but you would move the attached note to the collection, not the resource.

Search is fine when I am looking for a list of articles on a certain subject, but when I am trying to create an outline I prefer to drag the note into the collection.

elena:

This was a weakness in the initial design of Zotero that is now pretty much fixed, in part because search and reports features have been redesigned to select individual notes.

But that doesn't mean that individual notes are not fundamentally tied to the resource (internally, in Zotero), rather than to specific parts of that resource. You cannot create a note that refers to paragraph 3 of some document (where that paragraph is represented as a separate row in the database), and I'm not sure it'd be good idea to allow that, because it seems to me could result in a large jump in complexity in the UI (as well as everything else).

If you have a collection on gender, and your parent item is a book on baseball that includes three paragraphs on gender, it makes no sense to move the entire parent item, and it would be especially confusing if it has 10 or more child notes on topics that have nothing to do with gender.

Right, so my point is: don't have a collection on "gender" if you're worried about this. As you suggested above, tag the note with "gender" and create a saved search.

FWIW, I tend to use collections for projects; for example, an article or collection of articles I'm working on. The sole purpose there is to make the citations I may want to include in the manuscript quickly available.

awowwed:

This is exactly my point. The note belongs associated with the parent resource, but you would move the attached note to the collection, not the resource.

But how does that make any sense at all in the context of the UI?

What happens if you have one metaphor where the notes are explicitly denoted in the UI (through the parent-child tree), and in another context either not represented at all, or in some completely different way? How would you design the UI such that users don't end up losing the context for their -- now free-floating -- notes?

I really think there are some more fundamental issues to resolve with notes and annotations, including distinguishing different kinds of notes, figuring out if and how to track context (this quote comes from page 3), etc.

Search is fine when I am looking for a list of articles on a certain subject, but when I am trying to create an outline I prefer to drag the note into the collection.

I strongly discourage you from trying to bend Zotero collections to do outlining. It's not designed as an outliner. Perhaps that's part of the problem you're running into?

I have been using this program to store page identification numbers, it allows me to scan pretty fast and gather what I need but my problem is I forget where I have been and will collect the same link. Is there a way Zotero will tell me this link is already in my library? I'm new here so forgive me if this has already been addressed.

Thanks,
Jax

you can't display child notes without their parent item in any way, correct. When you set up a (saved) search, other attached items as well as the parent item would be greyed out, but they'll still be visible.

Oh. I am guessing Reports will let me do just that.