author/person items

raf

It would be great to have separate author or person-cards, or items dedicated to a given author or person -- for instance, for biographical information in child notes, but also, for instance, to relate other bibliographic items that concern this author or person (in one way or the other) to the respective author or person-item.

erazlogo

On author/person item types, see a response from Dan Cohen from a few months ago (start of third paragraph). I'm not sure if anything has changed since then.

dancohen

This is still coming up soon on the major to-dos for the next version, but we have had to work very hard to tie up all loose ends on 1.0 so that Mozilla could incorporate Zotero into the Firefox Campus Edition, due out tomorrow. So our timeline has been pushed back a little bit.

DeepText

A "person" item is an obvious and useful addition.
Further: why can't a user create his own item types?

bdarcus

It's planned, but it's a non-trivial problem if you care about things like data portability, reliable formatting, etc. (which I do; a lot!).

And, BTW, person shouldn't be an item type. There really needs to be an agent object/table, which can handle both people and organizations.

Xtraeme

I agree with bdarcus. Another important item that's missing is the abstract notion of an "event." This "event" item should support a) numerous places, b) numerous date/times c) numerous agents, and d) an abstract. A lot of my research is dealing with news articles that reference many time periods. Since there's no way to simply say, "this {1} newspaper article references {many} time periods" I'm forced to create duplicates. It's either that or use tags to do things like: 1982/08/02; 1982/08; 1982; 1980s; 1980s, early; 1900s; etc..

With agents and events it would make it extremely easy to cross-reference many complicated relationships.