Feature question/request: Locking groups and folders

[Jasso]

Hello again

I recently finished a large project and Bookends worked perfectly. Really, whatever remnants of sanity I have left, I pretty much owe to Bookends. Could not imagine doing the same kind of work without it. (I feel serious pity for earlier generations who had to do ref management by hand!)

Now that it's over I find myself thinking I want to store the group of references that I used in the project. So in the future I can quickly check which refs I had used in there.

Of course, it's easy to create a new group for them. Especially as all the references I used are still in the Hits list after my scanning.

But then I started thinking that as this group will never change again, it would be nice to be able to lock it. So that there would be no way to either add or delete refs from it by accident. (Weird drag and drop accidents tend to happen sometimes when one is tired and the computer is lagging badly...)

So it would be a cool feature to be able to, for example, right click the group folder and toggle *locked* on and off when needed.

Maybe this would be a handy feature to have for some other situations too.

[Jon]

interesting idea. Frankly, I'm not sure many people would find this useful, but still interesting.

Jon
Sonny Software

[jb]

How about simply adding to each of the references a unique keyword identifying it as part of the group?
Then you could recreate that group by keyword search. No?

[Jon]

@jb That's a very good idea. After the scan, do a Global Change -> Change Field and add a unique keyword to every reference in the hits list. Then create a smart group that searches the Keywords field for that token. Now one has a permanent and essentially locked group.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jasso]

Frankly, I'm not sure many people would find this useful, but still interesting.

Yeah, I totally see that. But I thought it's one of those ideas that if it's not too hard to implement it might just give the users more options.

I've used the keyword method in the past. And yes, it does work. But it started to feel somehow clunky. And it was hard to keep it consistent, especially with articles that I kept using often. So their keyword fields would be filled with "BA, MA, PhD, article1, article4, article7, book1, book2, conference2, ..." And in naming those keywords, one has to be careful not to cause problems for performing keyword searches in the future. Which is the main use for the keywords for me.

That's why I now prefer making groups of references which I nest under a folder "Published" for old works.

I also use folders to create temporary groups with subgroups for different projects. Like "Project x" has subgroups for "Lit rev" and "Methods" etc. So it makes sense to drag-and-drop stuff between old and new projects.

Those temporary groups for research might also be sometimes good to lock briefly. So turning such locking on/off quickly from a menu would be much more convenient than making batch changes to keywords.

[jb]

Maybe Jon will implement the locking feature. I might even find it useful
In the meantime, here’s another way to get what you’re after, I think.

When finished with your article/book, make a new rtf/Mellel/Word/etc document with (nothing other than) all of the in-text temp citations. Store that document somewhere (maybe in Bookends as an attachment to the reference for the relevant work?), and when you want to see the bibliography in Bookends again, just scan that document and open Hits.
Of course it’s not as quick as simply opening a Bookends group, but if you want to see these ‘old’ bibliographies only occasionally, that shouldn’t be such a burden.

Probably this is obvious and you’ve considered it, but I mention it just in case.

Cheers

[Jasso]

Thats not a bad idea either! This is again one of those cases where the problem – which is not really even a problem – can be solved in many ways.

However, that's almost the same as just keeping the original manuscript file and running a scan on that. Which I guess most of us will do anyway. Although your method might be faster to process than the whole 90,000 word manuscript.