Item Types for primary resources?

rac8f

Hello all,
I'm doing research with a variety of primary documents, including broadsides, photographs, pamphlets, and meeting minutes.
What item type do you use for these materials?

Thanks!

adamsmith

The idea is that all item types in Zotero have fields for archive and location in archive, so you can use item types according to what fits best:
e.g. "Image" for photograph, "Letter" for letters, etc.
I would use "manuscript" as a residual category for things like pamphlets and meeting minutes.

Improved support for archival sources (though likely not many more items types beyond archival collection) is on the menu, so you'd be able to more precisely describe the location of an item.

rac8f

Thanks, that helps! Luckily I'm not using this for a publication (yet), or that could be a bigger hurdle. Glad that a few more item types might be on the way.

adamsmith

as I said - not so much item types as more fields for existing item types. There's no way Zotero could ever comprehensively describe the range of primary sources historians use with item types, not even close.

rowlandr

I agree there lots of sources but why exclude photographs? This Library of Congress/Chicago page does recognize them. And while the citation masters may not have caught up, there is a big difference in the 21st century between a photograph and a image (especially if the image has been digitally altered)

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/usingprimarysources/chicago.html

adamsmith

same answer as above. There are just not going to be item types for every conceivable type of source. A photograph is a particular type of image, just as a oil painting is a particular type of image. Zotero's artwork item type has a medium field to specify this. I doubt we're going to break this down much more, sorry.