Collaboration, Preservation and Conclusion

Contents: Creating Collaborative Zotero Collections | Exporting Collections | Conclusion | About the Author

Creating Collaborative Zotero Collections

Another great feature that can help you during group projects, creating literature reviews and sharing resources with thesis and dissertation teams are Zotero’s Collaborative collections. To form a group, select the “Create a New Group” button on the groups landing page on zotero.org. You will be directed to a page where you can create a name for the group and designate the group as either public with open membership, public with closed membership and private, so the research materials are only visible to members you have invited. This will direct you to another stage where you can drill down on more visibility permissions as well as determining if you want everyone to have editing abilities for the materials. In some cases, you may want everyone to annotate and leave notes in a document to increase your knowledge base through communication but this will also leave documents vulnerable to being accidentally deleted depending on the technical abilities of your collaborators.

Once this is configured to your liking, visit Group Settings to Edit group name, create a project description, choose an image for the collection, designate disciplines and link to a project site if that exists. From this page, visit Member Settings and select Send More Invitations, where you can add all of the email addresses or Zotero usernames of your group members individually or in one batch separated by commas. Once the project is finished, visit Group Settings and select Delete Group after exporting and saving the collection for future reference, which we will unpack in the final section…

Exporting Collections

The final step in the process so that you can both keep your storage bandwidth low (and free) and retain all of your research and associated notes and tagging is to export this data before erasing. Like generating the bibliography, select all of the items you plan on removing, right click and select Export Items. For ease of accessibility and digital preservation, I create two copies: one in the Zotero RDF format that I can drop back into Zotero at any point and one in CSV format that is a) non-proprietary, b) human readable, and c) widely supported by a variety of spreadsheet software platforms if Zotero decides to do something strange in the future. For both copies, make sure you check the boxes below to include notes, files and annotations. Once you have saved a copy to your external hard drive and/or cloud based storage, right click the collection, select Move to Trash, open the Trash folder, select items, right click and select Delete Permanently to remove from both web and local libraries.

Conclusion

Thanks very much for your time! Some other materials related to organizing and visualizing research that might be of interest:

• This Introduction to the Library was designed for my work as the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Liaison, but it is a good primer for anyone wanting to learn more about all of the resources we have to offer, both digital, in-person, independent and interactive, as well as guides for how to use everything, including search strategies.

• Using Python Tools and Obsidian to Connect and Visualize Research is a workshop on visualizing scholarly research using a markdown based platform called Obsidian, which can be a very helpful addition to Zotero for long, independent research projects.

• Sourcing Copyright Free Media Workshop, though not directly related to citation management, it can be a helpful resource for gathering materials that can help make your research presentations more dynamic, learn copyright basics and identify some great, trustworthy resources beyond the library.

Questions? Comments?

About the Author