Manuscripts (archival material) in MLA format

clayton.mccarl

I am working with manuscripts (handwritten documents in archives, not unpublished journal articles). My understanding is that the "Repository" and "Loc. in Archive" fields are used to indicate the archive where the document is located and its location within that collection. For instance, take an example offered in the 7th ed. of the MLA handbook (see 5.7.12):

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. 1400-1410. MS Harley 7334. British Lib., London.

I enter the data thus in Zotero:
Title: The Canterbury Tales.
Author: Chaucer, Geoffrey
Date: 1400-1410
Loc. in Archive: Harley 7334
Repository: British Lib., London

but when I export using the MLA format, what I get is:
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Canterbury Tales.” 1400.

The problems are:
"MS" has not been added to indicate this is a manuscript
The title here actually should be italicized (this is a manuscript book, and MLA italicizes book titles)
Repository and Loc in Archive have not been included
In this particular example, the date has also been truncated.

Is this something that can be addressed?

komrade

I guess someone who knows how to fiddle with the Macro's in CSL (not me) would be able to fix the first problem fairly easily. The relevant CSL fields are "archive" and "archive_location".

The date issue is probably harder.
Zotero has a clever way of scanning the date field and extracting just the year, so that messy data input usually works nicely. (e.g. September2001, 09-03-2001, 5/4/01, 2001/4/5 and all sorts of other combos just give you 2001).

I don't really know how this works, but I can see that in your case it's not going to easily allow you to put in a date range. Is this very common in your field?
I'll let the experts comment on whether it's possible at the moment, or might be in future.

komrade

Sounds like the date issue might be solved with the new CSL processor -
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/6111?page=1#Item_11

Hopefully it's due any day now!