person category for library items

dranorter

I would like to be able to bookmark a 'person' in addition to the other categories (book, book section, conference paper, blog post, web page, etc.) in order to keep track of individual researchers and their blogs, websites etc.

(In general I'm all for many additional categories; Universities, departments and graduate programs would help as I research for graduate school, and things like cities too. But right now that probably wouldn't really be appropriate.)

noksagt

It is unclear to me how you'd benefit from having a 'person' type or what it means to cite a 'person.'

in order to keep track of individual researchers and their blogs, websites etc.

What is wrong with using the 'Web Page' type to have each of their blogs/websites & using the author field to credit them? If you want to keep track of everything by an author, you can probably use a search folder. If there is ambiguity in the author's name (e.g. you know multiple John Smith's), you can manually use collections or tags to sort their work.

Similarly for groups of people: it seems that the use of collections or tags would be better than polluting zotero with too many "weird" item types.

bdarcus

I agree it'd be bad design to treat people and other agents as "item types." But they are important related things; contributors and such. So one could imagine recognizing that in the Zotero UI and data model.

If you look under the hood of my website, for example, you'll see that I'm a person, with a name, interests, etc. Try:

curl -H "Accept: application/rdf+xml" \
http://bruce.darcus.name/about#me
My publications are then authored by, well, me:

curl -H "Accept: application/rdf+xml" \
http://bruce.darcus.name/publications/articles/protest-scale-publicity

Zotero 2.0 can, and should, exploit this sort of thing to the hilt.

dranorter

Yeah, I was thinking of rdf.

I guess you don't cite people, but you don't cite 'computer program's either and I gather information on them (take notes on them etc.).

noksagt

but you don't cite 'computer program's either

In some journals/fields, you do. I have. Many style manuals give instructions on citing software packages.

W.R.T. RDF/data models, I agree there is neat stuff that can be done & I doubt anyone would disagree with that. But I don't see dranorter really arguing for that. There have been a handfull of requests for Zotero to act as a database for other niche collections of items. I don't think that Zotero would benefit from being a person-management system right now.

(Many of the REAL benefits of a good data model will likely come from the publisher:journal:volume:number hierarchy before individual authors; others have solved that problem, unique IDs are better (wider consensus/adoption), they are more centralized and present data more uniformly, they have similar benefits to article tracking as authors would & also have many additional potential metadata benefits (automatic citation style selection, journal abbreviations, etc.) etc. This isn't to say that this is mutually exclusive to contributor information, of course. But I don't know if Bruce and dranorter are voicing a need for the same thing.)

dranorter

To clarify my point of view: I'm currently using both Delicious and Zotero, but when using Delicious for heavier tasks I miss some features of Zotero. So I'm thinking about switching over to Zotero for everything. But the particular task that made me consider this is a report for a history of technology class. There are three major pieces of software I'm collecting information about, and it would be nice to have a tool that could bookmark 'computer software' and allow me to fill in relevant fields and collect notes. Oh look, Zotero has that! And there are several relevant people as well. Would be nice to have a place to collect information about them too. Zotero doesn't have that.

I've found a semantic bookmarking tool called Semantic Turkey which might have everything I'm looking for. But what I would ultimately like would be a bookmarking tool with an 'item type' for everything... everything defined in rdf? everything for which Wikipedia has an infobox template? Something like that. I don't actually know that much about the semantic web. :)

DanSti

I would like to renew this old idea of a "person" category. Although I prefer Zotero, it's a reason why I appreciate LitLink. Sometimes I have the problem that I would like to note biographical information about an author or another person, who is mentioned in a book or an article. But Zotero can't cope with it.

So a "person" category could have default fields like birth date, death, occupation etc. and the linked notes function could be used for further information.

Considering the given categories I assume that a new category wouldn't request much effort. Just as little I think that Zotero would change into a person-management system (like noksagt mentioned). The bibliographical items have a originator so for me it seems quite logical to have the possibility of collecting whose information, too.

SiGi

+1

Some time ago I had a similar feature request.
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1040/entry-type-expert/#Item_3

It would be nice, if "persons" could be organized in Zotero as articles, patents,..

SiGi

moore.709

+1 --- I also would like to have a Person as a top-level Parent item with perhaps static fields for their institution(s), location and perhaps other simple demographics,
and then be able to add standard Notes and Tags for them.

Louise.Rouse

+1 ---- I agree, this would be hugely beneficial. The way that Customer Relations Managers like Zoho keep track of projects, clients, accounts etc as different relational entities.