 Welcome to the module on working with tags in Zotero. It's one of the five modules in our unit on managing Zotero collections. In this module we're going to cover how Zotero works with tags. We'll cover where tags appear in Zotero, adding tags manually, using the tag selector to manage tags, using colors to manage your favorite tags, renaming and deleting tags, where Zotero's automatic tags are, and what they are, working with Zotero automatic tags, and tips, general tips, for working with tags in Zotero. To follow along in this module you need to have Zotero installed on your computer. You can get the software at Zotero.org. And for more information on the basics of using Zotero, see our online guide, or check out the Mastering Zotero guide on GitHub. This module also uses some examples from a sample Zotero library that I'll be working with. You can use your own Zotero library to try out the features that I'm covering in general, but I've also made the sample items that I'm working with for this course available for you to import into your own Zotero library so that you can see exactly what I see, and click along. To learn how to get and import those sample items, see the course setup module and come back to this one when you're ready. Now tags are a great way to supply keyword descriptions to your Zotero items. These keywords can be used to organize your library. You can use them to describe the contents of your library in nice clean ways to make it easier to find items later or to keep track of your work. Tags appear in a couple of places in Zotero. One is down in the tag browser, which is at the bottom left area of the Zotero window. Another place you'll see tags is on individual items in the item pane. Finally, you should know that in addition to putting tags on items, you can actually individually tag attachments to items. So if you have a PDF version of a journal article, if you have a web snapshot of a page, if you put images in your library, notes, for most of these you'll see that the tags are listed at the top of the item panel when you select them. For notes, however, you'll see them at the bottom. Regardless of where you see these tags listed though, they all work the same way. Overall, there are two ways that tags get added to Zotero. The first is tags that you add manually. You can add tags to an item in Zotero with the tags button in the item pane. Just click the add button and type in the name of a tag. So I'm going to add privacy to this article on resetting the privacy discussion. I'm going to hit enter and there you see the tag. Note that there's a little blue tag icon next to it. Now that blue icon means that it's a manually added tag. So this is a great method for adding tags one at a time. If you want to add more than one tag, say you're brainstorming a list, what you can do is hold down the shift key when you press your enter key after the first tag and then that little single tag field will expand into a text field. And then in that text field, you can enter multiple tags, one per line, and then just click outside the entry field or use the add button again to turn these individual lines into separate tags. So this is a really great way to do it if you have a list of tag in another document that you just want to copy and paste into an item or if you're just brainstorming and trying to come up with a list of tags that you might clean up later. Now once you've started to build a set of tags, you'll see that Zotero will try to auto-complete your tag based on existing tags that you've already got in your library. So here I want to add culture as a tag to this item and you see that as soon as I start typing, Zotero offers suggestions based on tags I already have in my library. This is actually a really good way to make sure that you're staying consistent with your tagging and reusing existing tags wherever possible. Now as you build a list of tags for your library, they're going to start to appear in the tag selector on the bottom left. I can resize this area if I want by dragging the divider between it and the collections area above it. Now these two areas are connected. When I have my library selected, Zotero shows me all of the tags in the tag selector across my entire library. When I select a specific collection item in Zotero, the tag selector shows all of the tags on items within that collection. So here I choose this collection related to Canadian author Miriam Taves. So if I go to Related Authors and Works, which is a sub-collection, I'm actually only seeing items from this small collection. And then of course, when I select an item, I can see the tags for that item on the right in the item information. But you'll see that the tag selector still shows me all of the tags in the currently chosen collection. It's an important difference, so make sure you keep that in mind so you don't get confused. Now there are some really cool things you can do with the tag selector. First, let's say I have my whole library listed, I have my library to see all the tags in my whole library, and I select a tag in the selector. For example, I'm going to select History. Now, all of the items with that tag will be displayed in the items view. So what I've essentially done is filtered the contents of my library to display only items that have been tagged with History. I can just click the History tag again to unselect it, and then the view returns to showing everything in my library. If I select more than one tag, I will see items that contain both tags. So if I select History again, and then I select Quebec, I see that I have item in my library tagged with both of those keywords. And of course I can deselect these one by one, but if I have a bunch of tags selected, I can also use this little pop-up menu in the bottom right corner and choose Deselect All to clear all of my selections. Note that the tag selector also dynamically updates as I choose tags, which constrains the list. So when I click on History, you'll see that the list of tags decreases. That's because Zotero's tag selector is only showing me tags for the items that are in my library, and at least at minimum have the History tag. So from here then, for example, if I add Montreal to my selection, the tag selector list updates again to show me the limited number of tags that appear on items that both have History and Montreal. In my items view, I only see two items, and in the tag selector I only see a list of the tags that are used together with History and Montreal. So let's clear all of my selections again using the Deselect All option in the bottom menu. This is going to reset my tag list back to the default. If I have a bunch of tags in my library, and I do, I can use the search bar underneath the tag selector to narrow down the list. It will update dynamically as I type. So as I slowly type the word Indigenous, you can see that my list slowly narrows to tags containing those characters in that order. You can click the little X at the end of the search bar field to clear your text and remove the filter. If the tag selector's way of dynamically updating this tags as you filter and type is confusing, you can use that menu at the bottom to select display all tags in this library. And when you have this turned on, you will actually always see all of the tags in your library. They will all be listed. And then when you have selected a collection or a tag on the left, any tags in the tag selectors that do not appear in that collection or alongside that tag will just be grayed out. So here with the Miriam Taves collection selected, any tags that do not appear in items in that collection turn gray. And then if I select fiction, the item pane shows me all of my Miriam Taves items that are tagged as fiction and all the tags that are not used in conjunction with that get grayed out as well. I have a lot of tags in my library and I find the grayed out thing a little bit messy. So to keep things more clean, I'm going to use the bottom menu again to deselect all to reset my selection and I'm going to turn off that show all tags option. But you can make your own choice. So this leads me to the next tip. There's another way to add tags to an item using the tag selector. Just drag an item onto a tag and the tag will be added. So I've just noticed that I forgot to tag Miriam Taves book women talking as fiction so I can add the tag manually of course or I can just drag the item onto the fiction tag to add it. There we go and see here it appears now in the list of tags on the book item. There's one more feature of tags that can be very helpful for focusing your work. You can assign a color to as many as nine tags. Now here's why this is cool. Let's say I am doing research on confederation as one of the many topics I'm looking at in my history course. I can right click on the tag confederation and then assign one of the nine colors. How about purple? And then I set an order or rank from one to nine. Now two things happen when I do this. So the first thing is that that tag turns into the color that I picked so confederation is now my purple tag and that tags with colors are always shown at the top of my tags list. So up to nine of my most important tags can be set so that they're always visible and that order or rank number actually dictates the order that they're showing in from one to nine. The second thing that this does and I like this a lot is that it places a little colored box on items in your library that have that tag. So with my full library selected now I see that I have two items listed with a small purple box and I can very quickly and easily see that I have two items now that have the confederation tag. So like I said I can assign up to nine colors I can change the order of them I can remove colors in any way that I see fit and I can dynamically change it anytime my whims change it's just another great way that you can organize your library and keep track of your work. Of course I can also rename tags or delete tags in Zotero. I can do this by right clicking on a tag in the tag selector and choosing the appropriate option. Now this will rename or delete the tag everywhere it appears in your library so this is actually a really nice way to manage and clean up the tags in your library. So for example here you'll see that I've used two similar tags in my library colonization and colonialism to describe items. Now I know that these words have slightly different meanings in different contexts but for the project that I'm working on I'm just making a subjective decision that I only want to use colonialism to keep things simple. So if I right click on colonization and rename that tag to colonialism what I've done is I've effectively merged those two tags together so this is a really nice and easy way to clean up and organize your tags to simplify them. Now the second kind of tags you'll see in Zotero are called automatic tags. These work mostly the same way as regular tags but the way that they get into Zotero and how they're displayed are a little bit different. Now for some database platforms like EBSCO or PubMed or even if you're looking in the library catalog using this Zotero connector in your web browser to add an item to your library can also bring in a set of tags as part of the information that it imports for an item. So here's an example using an article from the MLA International Bibliography Database which is on the EBSCO platform. So when I access this article and use the Zotero connector to import it into my Zotero library I'm just going to put it in the my library folder I get the citation information in my library. Now I haven't added it to a collection yet so that means that this item that I just added is going to be easy to find if I click on my unfiled items collection. Now you can see that the information tab here has the author, the title and the journal information which is great and it looks fine. Now if I go into the tags tab you'll see that I actually also have a set of tags that have been automatically imported. Now automatic tags are always shown with a small orange icon you see here. Now remember that your own tags are marked in blue. Now the tags that you get here usually relate to the keyword subject headings that have been supplied for the item but sometimes you'll also get author supplied keywords or other things as well it depends on the database that you're using for your import. So I can delete any tags I don't want by using the minus sign on the right hand side. So let's say that the 2000 to 2099 classification isn't helpful for me in my work so let's just delete that with the minus sign button. There are some things about automatic tags that you should know. First if I use the tag selector to rename a tag I'm basically changing it from an automatic tag to a manual one. So for example if I rename this gender studies courses tag to just gender studies it changes it to blue. It's not an automatic tag anymore because I've modified it. Now I have mixed feelings about automatic tags sometimes they help me organize my library because I might see keywords imported that I might actually realize are cool and I want to use but sometimes they just create clutter. If you do not want Zutero to import these tags at all you can go to preferences and then on the general tab which should be the first one you can deselect automatically tag items with keywords and subject headings and then Zutero will not import these automatic tags anymore. The second thing to know is that if you're okay with having the tags in your database but you don't want to see them all the time you can uncheck show automatic in the tag selector. If I do that now you'll see that the only tag listed for the unfiled items collection now is the gender studies tag which is the only blue tag on that article I imported. This does not hide them from the individual item view. You'll always be able to see the orange and the blue tags there. Finally if you have a bunch of old automatic tags in your library and you just want to get rid of them all you can use the menu in the tag selector to select delete automatic tags in the library. You'll be asked for confirmation because you cannot undo this once you've done it so I'm going to cancel this for now because I want to do that. I'm going to finish up with just a couple of general tips for working with tags in Zotero. Keeping consistent is going to help you. There are many ways to design a scheme for tags but you should choose principles that work for you and then most importantly stick with them. So if you're working with others on a Zotero library for example in a shared collection it might be good for everybody to agree on a common approach. Here are just a couple of examples of questions that you might have to answer for yourself. Unless the tag is for a proper noun and needs capitalizing you can generally use lower case text. Tags in Zotero are case sensitive so racism racism and racism all sound the same but they're actually treated differently in Zotero so sticking with lower case just keeps it from getting confusing. Now in cases where a noun has a singular and a plural form I like to choose one over the other. I prefer plural but it's really up to you so I might use case studies instead of case study and I'll try to be consistent about it so that it will end up with both tags in the library. I can think of a couple of examples where this doesn't work so the rule is not absolute. So for example in my library I have a tag called theater and a tag called theaters they're not the same right theater is a type of performing art and theaters are the places where performing arts are shown. Remember that the goal is consistency there aren't really any hard and fast rules for how to use tags just go with what works for you and then try to be consistent about it so there you are those are the basics of working with tags in Zotero in this module we covered where tags are located and used in Zotero adding manual and automatic tags using tags and collections to filter your library color coding your favorite tags and working with automatic tags all of this builds on the previous module about working with collections now in the next module I'm going to talk briefly about the related items feature in Zotero see you there