Is Zotero going to work for my needs?

dbMngr-1
I work with a group of individuals involved in diverse scientific fields who want to have one place to keep everyone's journal articles, book chapters, etc. Once these documents have been stored we want this "library" to be searchable and able to be organized. Citing references will be done by some but not all of the members of the group, and is secondary to having a library everyone can access. I don't have much of a budget for this project so I'm not so interested in going the EndNote or ReferenceManager software route. Also, most of my users run Windows but an important minority use the Mac OS (I'm a part of the minority), so whatever solution I come up with will have to work on both platforms.
I was thinking of creating a master user role who collected all items and then invited the individual members to join the group which than had access to the master library. (If I didn't explain that clearly, let me know, I'll try again.) Never having used Zotero, I don't know if this will work or not. (I've been reading as much as I can on this blog and in the training materials provided by Zotero, but I'm not finding information regarding this kind of use. Also, I'm a computer USER, not a programmer steeped in the finer points of software development.)
Will Zotero, primarily a reference management tool, work as a library organization tool for multiple users? Is anyone else using it in this way? If you are, can we discuss how it has worked for you? Any suggestions? Concerns?
  • adamsmith
    Generally yes, this could work.
    You would probably all just want to share one single account and sync it to different computers:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/sync
    You could also have different accounts and all use one single group
    http://www.zotero.org/support/groups
    The master user would probably want to create the library in the group right away - transferring to a group is easy but takes some time (because you can't copy collections).
    If you also want to share the attached files you'll need to think about a storage solution (see the sync link above). Note that only Zotero's only storage will work for groups.

    Different OS won't be an issue, that's one of Zotero's draws.

    The only concern I can think of would be what the demands for organization are. Zotero has powerful organizational tools such as tags and collections, but some things cannot be done, most notably
    1. You can't order items in an arbitrary way (e.g. by how important you find them or so). Most people are fine with the dozen or so different sorting keys available, but especially those working with individual notes a lot have been unhappy with this.
    2. You can't add custom fields or custom item types. E.g. if you want an item type "sculpture" you can't create it - you'll have to work with artwork. Similarly, if you would want to add a field - say "PubmedID" to all or any item types that can't be done. (The latter will probably be included in future Zotero versions, though, but you get the idea.) There are good reasons for this and it won't change any time soon (if ever) so you should see if that works for you. (From experience, though, custom fields and item types are usually not necessary even were people initially think they are).
  • mronkko
    We have a similar use case and are very happy with Zotero. There are approximately 15 people working in our research group. We set up one account for which we purchased 10 gigabytes of storage (100$/year). The only purpose of this account is to set up group libraries to which everyone else subscribes to. Every one is given admin rights to the group library, so everyone can edit the libraries.

    I have used EndNote, Reference Manager, and RefWorks. The current setup we have is much better than any of these. (And less expensive too)

    We have also a mixed environment of Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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