Upgrade StorageClassified bibliography
I am due to teach a group of French masters students in history how to use zotero at the end of the week and while preparing this I have hit a problem.
They are expected to hand in a bibliography of their subject at the end of the year - this needs to be commented and classified, i.e. organised in sub-categories with the entries in alphabetical order inside the categories.
What would be the best way to do this with zotero? I imagine they would organise their material in a collection and subcollections until they are happy with it. Would it then be best to create the bibliography in word/open office writer with headings and the entries formatted for rdf scan, and then let zotero fill in the references? At least like that they would be able to re-use and re-format the bibliography.
If anyone can think of a better way of doing this, I'd be very grateful.
Clio
They are expected to hand in a bibliography of their subject at the end of the year - this needs to be commented and classified, i.e. organised in sub-categories with the entries in alphabetical order inside the categories.
What would be the best way to do this with zotero? I imagine they would organise their material in a collection and subcollections until they are happy with it. Would it then be best to create the bibliography in word/open office writer with headings and the entries formatted for rdf scan, and then let zotero fill in the references? At least like that they would be able to re-use and re-format the bibliography.
If anyone can think of a better way of doing this, I'd be very grateful.
Clio
I think what I would do is to use Zotero regularly for in-text citations (unless they are using a numerical style, but that seems unlikely in history) and just not insert a bibliography in Word/Ooo. WIth the items sorted in collections, I would then create the bibliographies in Zotero (Create bibliography from) and paste them to Word/Ooo.
I'll give it another think over and see if I can find a citation style that is close enough to be acceptable even in the long run.
I see how this would work with rdfscan but don't quite follow the other suggestion (generate bib and paste). Specifically how this deals with subheadings and annotations (what clio_13 calls comments in the OP). Are those done manually after generating the bib?
FWIW I've adopted a completely different, more manual approach. I created my own in-line style that spits out a full citation, and I insert those into my bib, amid all the headings and annotations. Obviously less automated but for my needs so far this has worked well.
What I'm suggesting is to create separate bibliographies for each subheading of the bibliography - not using the plugin, but using "create bibliography" in Zotero itself.
That requires very thorough book-keeping (haha) in the library - i.e. all items must be in the appropriate collection/have the correct tag - it's very much a workaround. On the other hand, it's hard to think of a good mechanism for creating sub-bibliographies that doesn't somehow involve tags or collections.
Edit: I just don't like solutions that assume that RTF works 100% - you will still have to dissambiguate, it might miss something etc.
I did think about using the abstract/extra field that way in a custom style. It would be nice to have a "canned" annotation.
I've also tried the approach of generating bibs (or sections thereof) from collections or tagged items. But as long as I'm editing a lot of captions and commentary, I've found it just as easy to insert items one at a time as I described.
In general I'd say this is an area where having multiple methods, and semi-manual methods, is not a bad thing. Bibliographies can get pretty complicated, with hierarchies and multiple languages/styles for instance. Difficult to cover all the use cases.