Chicago 17 to 18 Archive Citation Question

corbin31
I have a document that was previously using Chicago 17th edition, full notes and bibliography. In that document, a Letter was cited in a footnote as follows:
Captain William C. Watts, USN, Naval Attaché, London, August 24, 1926, ADM 1/8711/140, The National Archives of the UK.
So the order was: Author, Date, Loc. in Archive, Archive.

My document recently updated to Chicago 18th edition, notes and bibliography. The same Letter now displays in the footnote as:
Captain William C. Watts, USN, Naval Attaché, London, August 24, 1926, The National Archives of the UK (ADM 1/8711/140).
So the citation is now Author, Date, Archive (Loc. in Archive).

How can I change my settings such that the Location in Archive field appears before the Archive and not in parenthesis? Thank you.
  • dunning
    edited July 26, 2025
    CSL uses the archive fields for both physical archives and database references, which is a challenge to render correctly with Chicago, as they provide completely different formats for the two.

    Right now, documents, manuscripts, and archival collections all use the physical format by default. It seems a safe assumption that correspondence should do this as well, and I will update the styles with this.

    Until that happens, the format for physical archives is always triggered by specifying the archive place or archival collection, which you can add using the Extra field:
    archive-place: Kew
    archive_collection: Admiralty, and Ministry of Defence, Navy Department: Correspondence and Papers, 1914–34
    Providing either of these fields will mean that the citation appears in the order that Chicago specifies for physical archives. Note that in this case you only need to add the archival collection if you think it gives the reader useful context, since archival references for TNA provide all the information required to follow the citation.

    Adding the archive place will also allow you to label the archive using its official name, 'The National Archives' (or abbreviate it to TNA).

    There is one other issue that you may wish to consider: CMOS 14.205 specifies that libraries and archives outside North America should be cited with the place of the archive first rather than the location of the document within the archive. This is one of Chicago's model citations for TNA:
    1. Will of William Shakespeare, Gentleman of Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire, after 22 June 1616, TNA, PROB 11/127/771, fol. 466r.
    (If you wish to know what fields to use to obtain this citation, see Shakespeare's will in the Zotero Test Items Library.)

    There is no way to mix the two systems, but if all your archival references are to items outside North America, you can use one of the "archival references with place first" variants.
  • corbin31
    edited July 26, 2025
    @dunning
    Thank you very much for the response. My understanding is that there are 3 options:
    1) Change the item type for Letters to Manuscript.
    2) Remove the entries in the Archive field and the Loc. in Archive field and add archive-place and archive_collection entries to the Extra field.
    3) Wait for the styles update.

    I've got several hundred Letter entries in Zotero that I've cited in this project. Do you have an estimate of when the styles update for the Letter item type might occur?

    I'm using a mix of American, Canadian, and British archival references. Thank you for your help.
  • dunning
    It’s only a two-line fix; I should have something submitted by the end of the weekend, then it only needs to be reviewed.
  • corbin31
    @dunning

    I wanted to follow up and see when this update to the CSL correspondence archive citation will come out in Zotero. Thank you.
  • dunning
    The correction is included here:

    https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/pull/7679

    This needs to be reviewed before being included in Zotero. Everyone contributing to the CSL project is a volunteer, so it's hard to predict how long this will take.

    In the meantime, you can download the file for the style you are using if you wish to test it. If you're using the standard notes and bibliography system, the proposed file is here:

    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adunning/styles/73d309e61b6641d53dc9d1e559b60838382e4da6/chicago-notes-bibliography.csl

    If you decide to install this in Zotero, it will automatically update to the official version once it is available.
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