Citing Letters in Bibliography

gbrandy

Hey guys,

I'm currently writing a historical dissertation for which my university has its own (strange) referencing style. The university library has provided me with a basic Zotero code for the style, though it doesn't really cover all types of sources. I need to cite multiple letters and need the bibliographical reference to display the following information (in this order):
- Name of Author
- Name of Recipient
- Title
- Complete Date (Day - Month -Year)
- Location in Archive
- Archive Name

Can anyone help? I've searched through the forums but haven't found anything that helps.

Cheers!

damnation

If you can share the code of the citation style you were given, please upload it on pastebin.com or a similar service and we can guide you.

If not and you know a little bit of basic HTML/XML, you can add these things yourself.
For letters specifically see this: https://aurimasv.github.io/z2csl/typeMap.xml#map-letter

General editing instructions here: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step

gbrandy

Thanks so much! I've uploaded it to pastebin under the following link:

https://pastebin.com/Cs6F5LqE

damnation

You can add this somewhere in the conditional for the item types in the bibliography:
<else-if type="personal_communication">
<group delimiter=". ">
<names variable="recipient">
<name delimiter-precedes-last="always" initialize-with="" name-as-sort-order="all"/>
</names>
<text variable="title"/>
<date form="text" date-parts="year-month-day" variable="issued"/>
</group>
</else-if>

This will render:

Seppl H. Anschreiber, I. Der Schnecke geht’s schlecht. 24 December 2022, 666, Schneckenarchiv Münchhausen.

gbrandy

Fantastic, thank you so much for your help!

gbrandy

Hi, I have encountered another issue I hope you might be able to help with. When citing web pages, I need to change the order and form in which the publication data is presented in the bibliography.
Ideally, the citation would read:
Author(s), Year: Title. URL (accessed: DD.MM:YYYY)

Thanks in advance!

damnation

You're aware of the Visual Editor?
https://editor.citationstyles.org/visualEditor/

This will render the date like you want it. Adapt as necessary.


<group prefix=" (" suffix=")" delimiter=" ">
<text term="accessed"/>
<date variable="accessed">
<date-part name="day"/>
<date-part name="month" form="numeric" suffix=":"/>
<date-part name="year" suffix="."/>
</date>
</group>

gbrandy

I was not, thank you! I shall use that in the future.