Series Abbreviations

scot
Last we heard [http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2655/society-of-biblical-literature-note-style] there were plans (or at least hopes) to introduce series abbreviations in 1.5, but they're not in the sync preview, nor is there a trac ticket for them that I can find. I'd love to see them, along with eventually a way to standardize them against a local (or remote) canonical list. Can you sustain my hope? (I assume this may require CSL changes as well, if they are not already in place).

If you'd rather I do something besides simply re-raise the issue, please let me know.

For reference:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3211/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2045/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2047/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1305/
  • scot
    OK, so the din of the crowd rushing to this thread isn't exactly overwhelming. Still, my own small corner of the academic world (Biblical, Greco-Roman and Ancient Near Eastern Studies) is addicted to citing series by means of abbreviations, so I give this a tiny bump.
  • bdarcus
    edited February 10, 2009
    No need for CSL changes; "container-title collection-title" and "short" form.
  • erazlogo
    edited February 10, 2009
    Ticket added (for Zotero changes).
  • scot
    Great! And it would be nice if (as I think is planned eventually for the Journal Abbreviations field) we could have some kind of ability to administrate a central list of abbreviation<-->fulltitle associations for consistency, easy of global changes, and the addition of new abbreviations.

    And best of all is if all of this can be accomplished with the ability to add internet-based sources for standard abbreviations.
  • bdarcus
    I've been chatting with some people about putting up some periodical data as open linked data; am mildly confident it will yield results.

    It's kind of silly, if you think about it, that every application deals with this on its own (or not, as it were).
  • scot
    Greater things have surely started out with mild confidence. Post here or on your blog, when you get something up. And make it all look very open-standardsy, with micro-formats and RDF all that junk. (:-) That and a clean 2010-looking web page will I'm sure push your mild confidence onto application developers, who will then respond in their droves.

    I used to think that it was important to allow local tweaking of all such lists (publishers having different standard abbrev lists, etc, etc.) Now I think, aaaaw, lets just get something going. Once public web-based machine-readable standard abbreviation lists exist, there might also arise easy ways to consult them and re-substitute as necessary. At least I'm mildly confident of it, in the long term anyway. Once you prove the concept, some already-recognized standards boards will pick it up, mangle it slightly in the name of improvement, but the result will be something which is still much better than what we (don't) have now.
  • DWL-SDCA
    The problem of journal title abbreviations is truly a mess. There is a short article from the U.S. National Library of Medicine website that sheds light on this issue. The article provides references to (many) sources of (often conflicting) journal abbreviations.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=citmed.chapter.appb

    The article touches upon the issue of titles with non-Roman/Latin characters.

    The international standard maintained by ISSN in Paris is a very costly subscription database. Lately, even that hasn't worked properly. The ISSN website is painfully slow with Internet Explorer, doesn't work at all with Firefox, and some of the internal links don't work with Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari.
  • bdarcus
    This is the effort I was talking about, which I've been discussing with some people at Talis, among them Leigh Dodds, who used to be the CTO for Ingenta (and so knows a thing or two about these issues).
  • scot
    Looks good.
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