 Welcome to our module on using Zotero Collections. It's one of the five modules in our unit on managing your Zotero library. In this module, we're going to cover what collections are used for, creating, renaming, and moving collections, putting items in more than one collection, how to see which collections contain an item, removing items from collections, the Zotero trash bin, dealing with unfiled and duplicate items, and altering how Zotero displays items in collections. To follow along in this module, you'll 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. Collections are used to create groups and subgroups for organizing your library. You can use them to create hierarchies for items since they can be nested together. They look just like folders in the Zotero interface, and that model is familiar to people who are used to organizing files and folders on a computer. They're a little bit different in Zotero, but we'll get to that in just a moment. Here's an example of a library containing COVID-related materials organized by topic. Now, if you're new to Zotero, or if you only have a small library of items, you will most likely be using folders and collections to keep things organized. In fact, unless your Zotero library is very large, collections may be the only organizational tool you need. The example I just showed you demonstrates that you have a lot of flexibility about how you set up collections. It can vary depending on your discipline, your work as a student or a faculty member, your research workflow, or any other theme that makes sense to you. Typically, collections frame your work by relating to topics, themes, or projects. So here are some examples of ways that people might organize their collections. This first one is a real example of an online public Zotero library for game studies, which is divided by topic. A history student working on a project might divide work by decade or era. This is an example for a material related to a United States business history project divided by a century with some other containers related to geography. An English scholar studying the work of Canadian author Miriam Taves might divide the work into source materials, book reviews and articles, scholarly analysis, and related works by other authors. A student in a graduate classics course might create a collection for the class and divide it into sub-collections for the course readings, assignments, and their term paper. Finally, as a graduate student working on a major research paper or a thesis, you might create a collection for your literature review, related studies, methodology, primary sources, and more. You can see that there's a lot of flexibility. There are no hard and fast rules. You can organize your collections in whatever way makes sense to you. And of course, you can always change or revise it over time as your library grows or as you're thinking about your work. So how do we set up our collections? To create a collection, right-click on your library and choose New Collection. Name it anything you want. So in this example, I'm taking the History 2500 course on Canadian History and I want to create a collection for the class because I'm a student. If I want to rename the collection later, I can right-click on it and choose Rename. So here I'm deciding to add the full course title to the collection name because five years from now, I won't remember what History 2500 was, but I will remember the topic. Within a collection, you can create sub-collections. As I've mentioned, these could be set up for topics, for specific assignments, for timeframe, geography, almost any scheme that you can imagine whatever works for you. These are created in the same way, but you'll see that if you right-click in a collection to create another collection inside it, so Terral labels them as sub-collections because they're nested inside the top level. So let's say I am preparing for my History 2500 course and I want to create a collection for the readings. I can right-click and create a readings sub-collection. The idea that I'm thinking of is that I might create citations for the readings from the syllabus and I'm going to add those readings to the sub-collection when I get them from the professor so I can keep track of my readings for the course. So now let's say I get the syllabus for History 2500 and I look at it only to discover that there are actually three textbooks that are going to be used for the course and not a bunch of journal articles. So at this point, readings doesn't really make a lot of sense as a category since they're not giving me a bunch of articles to read. So I've decided to change readings to textbooks because that just makes more sense. So I'm going to right-click and rename this collection. Now there are several ways I can get my citations into this collection. The first is to use the Zotero connector, which you can learn more about on the Zotero documentation site or in our other guide. Now John Belshaw's pre-Confederation textbook, which is listed for the course, is actually available for free online because it's an open educational resource. You can use the link on the screen to locate the book if you want to follow along here. Now Zotero needs to be open and running for this to work. I just click on the book icon in my web browser and in the dropdown I can tell Zotero to put this book directly into my textbooks collection. Let's say I don't do that though and I just add it to my Zotero library at the top level. If I go back to Zotero, I can now see the book in my library. I'll double-check to make sure the entry looks good, which is always a good idea and this one looks pretty decent. Now what's nice in this case is that Zotero detected it as a book and created it with the right type. Sometimes items from the web just get imported as web pages and you have to change the type to make sure you have the correct fields for a book or a blog or a video. Zotero did really well in this case though and it pulled in the publisher, the web address, the date, and the author automatically. Looking at the fields that are still empty, I might be able to find some other information though so let's just take a moment to double-check the website. If I had a paper book in front of me, I could find all of this information in the front matter, the first few pages. Online though, it can be a bit of a scavenger hunt and I have to check. So in this case, if I scroll down on this web page and look at the book information which they put at the bottom of the site, you'll see that they gave me a suggested citation for the book which is great and I see that the place of publication is listed as Victoria BC. That's about the only other thing that I can add based on what I see here. So quickly then I can go back into Zotero and add it by updating the information in the place field to show Victoria BC. So from here then, if I want to add the textbook to the collection I made for textbooks, I can just drag and drop it. There you go. Now you'll see it is sitting in my textbooks collection. Now let's go back to the course syllabus. It says I'll be writing essays for the course so I've decided to create a sub-collection called essays where I can put resources I find while I'm doing those assignments. So I'm going to right-click, create choose sub-collection and enter the name essays that I want to use for this collection. Now I can rename these if I want or drag and drop them to reorganize them. So in this case I actually made an intentional mistake when I created the essays collection. I added essays inside the textbooks collection which isn't actually what I want. No problem. I can just drag the sub-collection out and into the course collection so that it appears beside the textbooks collection instead of underneath it. So this is an example for a course but as I showed you in the examples earlier I can organize my collections and items any way I want. By decade, century, geography, language, whatever makes sense within the context of my studies, my workflow, and my research. Now the big difference between Zotero collections and other organizational systems is how Zotero thinks about items and collections. So in the previous example we just moved the textbook into our textbooks collection but look, if I click on my library you'll see that the book is still listed there. This is because my library in Zotero will always show you everything in your entire Zotero library regardless of what collection you have placed things in. The collection is just a way of organizing your library. I can see the book in my textbooks collection but it's also still in the my library folder. This is actually intentional because, dirty secret, Zotero will actually let me put an item into more than one collection. When you place an item in a collection it does not create a copy of it. It just puts the item in a container and in Zotero you can put items in more than one container at the same time. This is how Zotero is a little bit different than the way your computer organizes files and folders. Here's an example. I have an entry for my course textbook and then during the semester I realize that I'm going to cite my textbook in my essay. To keep things organized because I want to put all of my resources from my essay together I'm going to drag and drop the textbook entry from my library into the essay's collections. You'll see that it doesn't move the item from one folder, one collection to the other. It just alters the listing to show that the item appears in my library but it also appears in both collections. So here it is in essays and here it is in textbooks. It's the same item. It's in both places. There's an easy way to see what collections hold an item or if an item is listed in more than one place. To do that you can select an item in your library and then hold down the control key or the option key on a Mac. You'll see that Zotero will show the yellow highlight for all of the collections in which this item appears. Now let's say I don't want to have the textbook listed in my essays folder anymore. It's just too confusing to keep track of. So I'm just going to right click and select remove from collection in the essays collection. Zotero will ask if I'm sure and I am so I click OK. There's a very important distinction here. Removing an item from a collection does not delete it from your library. So in this case inside the textbooks collection where my textbook is still listed note that the menu when I get my right click has two options. Remove from collection and move item to trash. The first item just takes the item out of the collection folder that I'm currently located in. So in this case it got removed from the essays collection but it still exists in my textbooks collection. If I hold down the control key or option on a Mac I see that the book is still there and it is still listed in the textbooks collection. If I want to delete the item completely from Zotero I would select move item to trash. Zotero will ask me to confirm this too which is good and in this case I'm going to click OK. Now moving an item to the trash removes the item from all of the collections and it also deletes the item from my Zotero library all together. You'll see that it's not an essays collection now it's not in the textbooks collection now but when I click on my library it's also missing from there as well it is gone. So there's just a couple more things I want to point out before we move on. The first obvious thing might be the trash bin. So just like the trash can recycle bin on a computer Zotero has a trash bin. So if I trash something by accident I can get it back for 30 days. I can also empty the trash forever by right clicking on it and choosing empty trash. So previously I deleted that pre-confederation textbook and let's just say that was a mistake. So let's get it back. If I go to the trash I can right click and select restore to library and then this book will once again be listed in my library and in fact it will even put it back into the collections it was in at the time that I deleted it. So here now you can see that it has reappeared in my textbooks collection as well. Third there's a special folder in Zotero called unfiled items. So any loose items in your library that are not part of any collection will be shown here. I like to check this folder on occasion just to make sure there aren't items that I haven't organized yet. So if I check that collection now I don't have any of my textbooks for the course but I put them in the very top my library folder. That means they're in my library but they're not in any collections. I can verify that by using the trick I showed you earlier hold down the option key on a Mac or control on Windows and you'll see that no collections light up. If I had a lot of items in my library that were disorganized this would be a pretty bad way of figuring out what hasn't been put in a collection anywhere. So instead I click on unfiled items see now that the item appears here in unfiled. So from here I can just drag the item from unfiled into a collection. So I'm going to shift click to select both of these books and drag them to the textbooks collection. This files them and then because they're not unfiled anymore they no longer appear in this list. If I click on my textbooks collection I'll now see all three book items. This is one way to help manage your library. Let's say you spend an afternoon doing some research in the library and adding just as a tarot. At the end of the afternoon you can check this unfiled collection to see anything that hasn't been organized double check the info and then put the items into collections. The other folder that's good to know about is the duplicate items folder. Let's say you're doing an online search over the span of a few weeks and for some reason you add a reference to the same journal article twice. This happens all the time to me certainly usually by accident or as a result of adding things manually and since an item can appear in more than one collection you might be confused about which entry is which. For example, let's say I accidentally add the same web page item twice but I added it to different collections each time. So let's look in my master's degree collection under major research paper and here you'll see I have an entry in the theory collection and one in the literature review section. They look the same and we know that you can add one item to multiple collections but is this actually the same item? Well, the duplicate items folder will tell you. If I click on it any duplicate entries in my library will appear. They'll be shown and you can merge them together. Using this panel on the right it will list all of the versions it has found. So here I can see all the metadata or information fields for both items and decide which one is the one with the most correct information. I'll select the newer one here and then I'll click merge to combine them. The only caveat here is that the items must be the same type for the merge work. So you can't merge a blog post and a web page for example. In this case you might have to change the item type of one of your duplicates so that they match before you can merge them together. Finally I'm going to talk about how Zotero displays collections. When I click on the library icon at the top of the browser pane I will see everything that is in my library. But when I click on a collection I only see what is contained in that collection. This is true even if I have sub-collections. So for example, if I click on that collection from my History 2500 class it does not display the items contained underneath it in textbooks and essays. This makes sense to me and it makes sense in terms of how your computer manages files for example but the inconsistency between how that my library collection shows everything and how the collections items just show some things can be confusing. So the good news is that you can change it if this is confusing for you. Under the view menu there's a toggle called show items from sub-collections. If I select that, Zotero will show me everything in the collection I'm in plus items in the sub-collections underneath it. It's not dynamic if you change the setting you might have to click away from a collection and then back in to see it updated correctly but it does work and you'll see that in addition to listing the items from the sub-collections it also lists all the tags from those sub-collections and we're going to be talking about tags much more in the next module. This is just a toggle setting so you can turn it on and off again anytime from the view menu. That's our overview of collections. In this module we discussed how collections can be used to organize content how items can be in more than one collection how to find out which collections contain an item how to locate and deal with unlisted and duplicate items and how to use the Zotero trash bin. In the next module I'll be covering the other major tool that you can use to organize your library tags. See you there.