Upgrade StoragePlease implement anthology entries
I love Zotero and am glad it exists, but I have a MAJOR complaint about core functionality: the absolutely basic stuff, a feature that should constitute part of Zotero's fundamental bedrock. At bottom, Zotero is a citation manager. Everything else is gravy. And the developers seem to have forgotten that with Zotero 2, whose main upgrades seem to be in networking, collaboration and such--again, features that are mere icing on the cake, not Zotero's core functionality.
It's now two years agone with a brand-spanking-new version of Zotero just out--not another incremental release, but an entire whole-number release--and we still can't create anthology entries from a library MARC record! The ontological musings discussed in threads such as http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/917/introduction-by are beside the point; surely we can all agree that automated anthology entries are necessary, no matter how they're implemented, and that they should have been implemented in Zotero 2, for crying out loud--this has been an issue since 2006! See http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/78/books-and-book-sections-avoiding-input-of-duplicate-info/ and http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3031/book-section-link-to-book-entered-once/.
Currently, the process is much more clumsy than it should be. Sure, you can "Duplicate Selected Entry" and get the book editors and the book title, but you still have to change various things (first, you have to change the duplicated entry into a book section; then the editor is inexplicably listed as "Contributor" rather than "Editor", so you have to change that; and Zotero fails to give you an "Author" field, so you have to click the plus icon beside one of the editors to get one).
Here is what we need:
1. Because there are lots of older MARC records which do not separately list the essays and authors in an anthology, we need to be able to do the following: Once the book is in Zotero, we need to right-click on the book item in Zotero's middle column and have some kind of context-sensitive option that says not just "Duplicate Selected Entry" but rather "Duplicate Selected Entry as Book Section". Then all we have to do is choose that option, and we should get a new entry which has an Item Type of Book Section at the top with the blank Title field ready for use (as Book Section" currently offers) and with the following improvements: the editor should be listed as EDITOR rather than "Contributor", and there should also be a blank "Author" field ready for use above the Editor field.
2. Nowadays (and this has been the case for about 5 or so years now, at least as long as Zotero has existed), many library databases have MARC records of anthologies with the article titles and authors (some even have beginning page numbers) all listed in separate MARC data fields. To take advantage of those records, we need an automated feature that allows us to pick and choose which articles we want to make into a Book Section item, and simply do that with a single click without having to create a separate Book item. (Often I don't actually want the book itself as a separate entry in my database--all I want, and all I will ever use from that anthology, will be a single article.)
Zotero is a great tool, but this particular feature is looooooooong overdue. Although I concede the potential for scholarly networking, etc., IMHO the developers have gotten too carried away with such plans at the expense of core functionality: most of us will continue to use Zotero mainly as a citation manager, and the ability to automatically create all citation entries of an anthology from the library MARC record, let alone more easily create anthology-article items manually, is something that should have been there right from the very beginning. Please implement it.
It's this kind of core failure that caused my university to ignore Zotero and go to the expense of getting a whole site-wide license for Endnote, which in 2009 was "upgraded" to include a FREE personal copy for all full-time students, staff, and faculty. I have avoided getting my free Endnote out of loyalty to the open-source philosophy, and I hate it when the bad guys win because the good guys aren't doing the things they should. If I seem a little shrill, it's because I fought a losing battle for Zotero at my university.
It's now two years agone with a brand-spanking-new version of Zotero just out--not another incremental release, but an entire whole-number release--and we still can't create anthology entries from a library MARC record! The ontological musings discussed in threads such as http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/917/introduction-by are beside the point; surely we can all agree that automated anthology entries are necessary, no matter how they're implemented, and that they should have been implemented in Zotero 2, for crying out loud--this has been an issue since 2006! See http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/78/books-and-book-sections-avoiding-input-of-duplicate-info/ and http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3031/book-section-link-to-book-entered-once/.
Currently, the process is much more clumsy than it should be. Sure, you can "Duplicate Selected Entry" and get the book editors and the book title, but you still have to change various things (first, you have to change the duplicated entry into a book section; then the editor is inexplicably listed as "Contributor" rather than "Editor", so you have to change that; and Zotero fails to give you an "Author" field, so you have to click the plus icon beside one of the editors to get one).
Here is what we need:
1. Because there are lots of older MARC records which do not separately list the essays and authors in an anthology, we need to be able to do the following: Once the book is in Zotero, we need to right-click on the book item in Zotero's middle column and have some kind of context-sensitive option that says not just "Duplicate Selected Entry" but rather "Duplicate Selected Entry as Book Section". Then all we have to do is choose that option, and we should get a new entry which has an Item Type of Book Section at the top with the blank Title field ready for use (as Book Section" currently offers) and with the following improvements: the editor should be listed as EDITOR rather than "Contributor", and there should also be a blank "Author" field ready for use above the Editor field.
2. Nowadays (and this has been the case for about 5 or so years now, at least as long as Zotero has existed), many library databases have MARC records of anthologies with the article titles and authors (some even have beginning page numbers) all listed in separate MARC data fields. To take advantage of those records, we need an automated feature that allows us to pick and choose which articles we want to make into a Book Section item, and simply do that with a single click without having to create a separate Book item. (Often I don't actually want the book itself as a separate entry in my database--all I want, and all I will ever use from that anthology, will be a single article.)
Zotero is a great tool, but this particular feature is looooooooong overdue. Although I concede the potential for scholarly networking, etc., IMHO the developers have gotten too carried away with such plans at the expense of core functionality: most of us will continue to use Zotero mainly as a citation manager, and the ability to automatically create all citation entries of an anthology from the library MARC record, let alone more easily create anthology-article items manually, is something that should have been there right from the very beginning. Please implement it.
It's this kind of core failure that caused my university to ignore Zotero and go to the expense of getting a whole site-wide license for Endnote, which in 2009 was "upgraded" to include a FREE personal copy for all full-time students, staff, and faculty. I have avoided getting my free Endnote out of loyalty to the open-source philosophy, and I hate it when the bad guys win because the good guys aren't doing the things they should. If I seem a little shrill, it's because I fought a losing battle for Zotero at my university.
I also agree about what constitutes core functionality here and what does not, but of course different people have different ideas there. Precisely for that reason I would politely suggest that some sort of longer-term mission statement and implementation plan would benefit everyone.
As for 2., in my experience with MARC-field data for book chapters is nowhere near unified enough to make this work decently well for auto-import, nor am I clear on how this would reasonably look in terms of workflows, so I'm honestly not seeing that happening.