Upgrade StorageSerialized articles redux
Thanks as always to the devs and the community for making Zotero an indispensable and outstanding tool.
I have a series of fifteen articles serialized in a newspaper that I would like to cite as a single source.
This is a single-title, single-author series, so basically, "Article ABC, Parts 1-15."
I looked at the discussion regarding serialized articles here:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/23712/serialized-article-best-practices
The takeaway seemed to be that there is no easy way to do this in Zotero.
I followed the link chain back to the ticket for this posted in 2009:
https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/1368
I don't know what "Milestone 2.0 Beta 3 deleted" means, but it doesn't sound like there is or will be a solution.
Is this correct?
That would be unfortunate.
It's particularly sad because the problem is related (I think...) to one of the most important feature requests that many of us have had since Zotero emerged: better date handling. We still don't have a way to provide, for example, original and republication dates. I assume that this is related to the way Big Z parses and interprets dates -- for which, of course, I'm grateful because it means that I don't have to retype the dates manually for hundreds of sources.
In the case of multiple publication dates (which I need to reemphasize is of paramount importance to historians!), making Zotero recognize data in the date field in square brackets as a separate date should be enough, no?
Anyway, that obviously won't work with serialization, and neither hyphenated dates nor dates separated by a tilde work at present. Is it possible to, as suggested above with square brackets in the case of multiple publication dates, designate a symbol (tilde, probably) for Zotero to parse as a "from... to..." publication date?
In other words, if I could cite a date range (1919.2.26-1919.3.18, etc.) rather than a date (1919.2.26), then I could change the title and be done with it. But that doesn't work:
“Shokuryō mondai kaiketsu.” Kōbe Shinbun. February 26, 1919.
For the present, what are the best workarounds?
For the future, what, if any, plans are there to implement a solution?
I have a series of fifteen articles serialized in a newspaper that I would like to cite as a single source.
This is a single-title, single-author series, so basically, "Article ABC, Parts 1-15."
I looked at the discussion regarding serialized articles here:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/23712/serialized-article-best-practices
The takeaway seemed to be that there is no easy way to do this in Zotero.
I followed the link chain back to the ticket for this posted in 2009:
https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/1368
I don't know what "Milestone 2.0 Beta 3 deleted" means, but it doesn't sound like there is or will be a solution.
Is this correct?
That would be unfortunate.
It's particularly sad because the problem is related (I think...) to one of the most important feature requests that many of us have had since Zotero emerged: better date handling. We still don't have a way to provide, for example, original and republication dates. I assume that this is related to the way Big Z parses and interprets dates -- for which, of course, I'm grateful because it means that I don't have to retype the dates manually for hundreds of sources.
In the case of multiple publication dates (which I need to reemphasize is of paramount importance to historians!), making Zotero recognize data in the date field in square brackets as a separate date should be enough, no?
Anyway, that obviously won't work with serialization, and neither hyphenated dates nor dates separated by a tilde work at present. Is it possible to, as suggested above with square brackets in the case of multiple publication dates, designate a symbol (tilde, probably) for Zotero to parse as a "from... to..." publication date?
In other words, if I could cite a date range (1919.2.26-1919.3.18, etc.) rather than a date (1919.2.26), then I could change the title and be done with it. But that doesn't work:
“Shokuryō mondai kaiketsu.” Kōbe Shinbun. February 26, 1919.
For the present, what are the best workarounds?
For the future, what, if any, plans are there to implement a solution?
I manually edited the citation to be:
“Shokuryō mondai kaiketsu,” Kōbe Shinbun, February 26 to March 18, 1919.
The journal name lost emphasis, and I can't get it back even by selecting italics in Classic View.
This means that manual editing, the only good workaround I am aware of, is also off the table.
I think the footnote is going to end up:
“Shokuryō mondai kaiketsu.” Kōbe Shinbun. This series of fifteen articles ran from February 26 to March 18, 1919.
But that's no help with the list of sources cited.
Ranges of articles I just have no idea how to handle in a reference manager still.
I'll keep looking for a workaround that will address both the footnote and the sources list.
Looking forward to the big update!
And a workaround for citing a date range (“1919.2.26-1919.3.18”) is to leave the “Date” field empty, and insert an ISO8601/EDTF date range string in the “Extra” field, using the following syntax: `{:issued:1919-02-26/1919-03-18}`.
Actually, I’d like to encourage the Zotero team as much as possible to support ISO dates – it’d be so straightforward: just *either* parse them properly, *or* export them as “literal” – processors are smart enough to deal with either of the two. But the crude attempt at parsing currently done by Zotero (2015/2016 parsed as 2015-00-00, and 1919-02-26/1919-03-18 as 1919-02-26) just isn’t helpful.
I think I'm going to take @fbennett on his offer and learn a bit more about this.