date range

courtneyfriesen

Hi,

Is there a way for zotero to insert a date range, i.e., for a multi-volume work that is published over a period of years?
e.g.,
Leipzig: Hinrich, 1905-1939.

Thanks!

adamsmith

Not really, no. See here for a suggested workaround:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/6111/2/better-date-field/#Item_14
better date options are on the agenda, but I'm not sure we'll be able to get them in to Zotero 4.2 (which is the earliest this will happen)

S_Gauntlett

Note: the suggestion referred to above, made by MHSmith on 15 Nov. 2010, is for year-only date ranges. When entering a day-specific date range, one has to make further changes to fool the Zotero parser.

E.g., I wanted to enter a date range that followed as closely as possible an international standard date format, as 2011-05-31to2011-06-19. However, I saw by the "y m d" notation that appeared beside my date range that Zotero only recognized the first date in the range. I replaced the dashes with underscores and the notation disappeared.

Our team has not yet mass-exported Zotero records into another CMS as we plan to, and we have little experience so far with how Zotero exports to different platforms. But we want there to be no chances for Zotero or any other digital system to mis-parse this most crucial metadata field, even if it means post-import editing work.

I cannot reiterate enough how important it is that Zotero somehow get up to speed on this issue and not rely on workarounds, most particularly for the sake of describing digital documents and records that CHANGE, are not confined to one "most important" publication date, but rather have multiple dates that identify them. For which a single date in the date field is a significant misrepresentation.