Citing National Archives Records

apowers313

The National Archives of the United States make specific recommendations about how to cite their documents:
http://www.archives.gov/publications/general-info-leaflets/17-citing-records.html

I'm trying to figure out how to capture the information in Zotero so that it can be cited correctly. Generally, the format needs to be <title>; <record locator (varies by record type)>; <series>; <record group>; <repository>. The URL above provides some specific examples in the first few pages.

While all these fields seem to be available in Zotero (such as in the "book" entry) I'm not quite sure how to identify something that was entered as a "book" (but isn't really a book) is actually an archive record so that the citation can be formatted correctly.

Any recommendations of how to make sure the formatting of the citation is correct?

adamsmith

if you put the right information into the "archive" and "loc. in archive" fields in Zotero, it can, in principle, handle this correctly. Also, citation requirements are general recommendations - each citation style will actually handle this slightly differently.

In general, many existing Zotero styles aren't coded to deal with archival info correctly. The most reliable ones are the various Chicago styles as well as the MHRA style and, I believe, MLA.

apowers313

After playing around with it a bit I see how I could make this work by using a few <choose> elements. Instead of modifying the Chicago style (which I would then have to maintain / merge for any future changes that anyone else makes), is there any way to write my own style just to handle archives and "include" the Chicago style for all the existing types of documents that it handles? (Similar to how programming languages allow including headers and other files?)

erazlogo

Unpublished archival sources are cited with Chicago Full Note with Bibliography correctly--use Manuscript or Letter item type. Published sources such as books or articles usually don't needs archival information. In Zotero, archival info was omitted for books and articles for historical reasons and now can be put back.

One difference from the NARA guide is that the guide suggests separating series, record group, etc. with a semicolon, but CMoS suggests a comma (and really, how would you cite several sources in the same footnote using semicolons within a reference?). Zotero Chicago styles use commas.

<title> goes in the Title field
<record locator (varies by record type)>, <series>, <record group> goes in Loc. in Archive
<repository> goes in Archive

apowers313

erazlogo - thanks, I checked that out and it actually works. I'm impressed.

Interestingly, CMoS 14.304 points to the National Archives document that I did for citing records, but then their examples list institution before title, which is a departure from NARA's title-first if there's no explicit author. I'm not sure which way is right...

Unfortunately, the publication I'm writing for requires Author-Date format (and probably Harvard style at that), so I will probably still have to doctor something up.

adamsmith

try Chicago (author-date) - if that doesn't work, either erazlogo or me will be happy to fix that one up to work correctly with archives. Since the note and author/date styles are virtually the same since the 16th edition, that shouldn't be so bad.

apowers313

For the record, Chicago (Author-Date) doesn't work correctly -- it defaults to "Anon" if there is no author rather than using the institution.

Harvard (Author-Date) doesn't cite archives correctly either according to this (search for "archive"):
http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/referencing/harvard.htm

I was planning on taking a shot at fixing up the Harvard citation, just for my own entertainment, but I wouldn't mind taking a look at how the Chicago style implements it if you could point me towards that XML.

Also, any idea what the process is for submitting changes back for consideration in the next distribution?

adamsmith

Harvard 1 is deprecated and will likely be replaced - there is a style "Harvard Anglia Ruskin" - that doesn't do archives either I believe, but work on that.

Sharing styles:
https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/wiki/Submitting-Styles
XML/CSL for all styles:
https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles

apowers313

As I'm playing around with this, I came across a NARA recommendation that subsequent uses of the same phrase be referred to as acronyms. For example, the second reference to "Record Group 60" would be "RG 60"; or "National Archives and Records Administration - Pacific Region (San Francisco" would be "NARA - Pacific Region (SF)"; or "National Archives Building, Washington, DC" would be "NAB".

Is there any way to have an citation style automatically note abbreviation in the first use, and then use that abbreviation instead of a the full phrase in any further uses?

adamsmith

no, not currently.

ajlyon

You may want to explore the Abbreviations Gadget that Frank Bennett has been working on for legal styles: http://citationstylist.org/tools/?#abbreviations-gadget-entry

It currently requires the experimental multilingual branch of Zotero, but you should definitely look into it. I'm sure Frank would be interested to see what use the gadget might see outside of legal styles, to make sure his approach is sufficiently broad to cover all major situations.

adamsmith

ajlyon - are you sure? I thought it worked with the latest Zotero beta?

ajlyon

Oh-- it probably does. I was going my the text on Frank's site, which indicated that it hadn't landed in mainstream Zotero yet. If it works for the betas, that's great.

adamsmith

actually - going by what frank says, the current beta won't work, but the 3.0 branch .xpi, which is very stable currently, would.
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev_builds#zotero_30_branch

TheLen

I have a related problem and thought I would add it here since it relates the export of citations for archival records. Please let me know if I should move this question to a different/new thread.

I use Chicago Style and when I export entries with the item type of "document," "manuscript," or "letter" (and possibly other types, but those are the ones I'm specifically running into problems with -- I can check other types if it would be useful) using the "Chicago Manual of Style (full note)" format, the comma after the document title is outside of the quotation marks rather than inside.

The citation should read:
“Memorandum to Morris Leibman,” August 16, 1965, Citizens Committee (Foreign Policy Groups)/Morris Leibman; Box 48; WHSF: SMOF Colson, NPLM, College Park, MD.

Instead, the citations appears in the footnote as:
“Memorandum to Morris Leibman”, August 16, 1965, Citizens Committee (Foreign Policy Groups)/Morris Leibman; Box 48; WHSF: SMOF Colson, NPLM, College Park, MD.

Is there any way to modify the citation style to correct this? Books, journal articles, and newspaper/magazine articles all export correctly.

I am currently using Zotero version 3.0.1, but had this problem with earlier versions. I have resigned myself to manually correcting the 1,000+ instances in my PhD, but would love to find a way to make this correction with Zotero (and therefore to keep Zotero from "autocorrecting" my manual corrections as well!)

Thank you for any help/advice/suggestions.

adamsmith

That's certainly incorrect, yes. Could you try installing the style
Chicago Manual of Style (full note) [delimiter fixes]
from the repository at zotero.org/styles and test it with that? The style should otherwise be equivalent to the regular full note style.

TheLen

That fixed it! And no problems entering both books and documents in the same footnote.

Thanks!

(Now if I could just go back in time and enter my archival information correctly to get rid of those extra semicolons . . .)

Thanks for the quick response -- it made a great resource even better!

adamsmith

We'll replace the regular Chicago style with this version shortly - thanks for testing. If you do find any issues with that style - especially issues that haven't come up with the old version - please do let us know.

TheLen

Will do! Thanks again!