yes, you'd need to change the csl for that.

btw what I really do not understand is why there is a type of reference "Artwork" but in the bibliography "medium" and "size" are not automatically included, which is what distinguishes "artwork" from other references and is the minimum requirement in any listing.

the same with "letter", according to referencing rules for letters the full date has to be given, but Harvard Style 1 which I use automatically only produces Year, which is useless.

Same with non-public documents in an archive, where the name of the archive and call number is a crucial reference.

It would be great if some good soul would change that for some main styles such as Harvard Ref which I use, even if that comes too late for my PhD which I submit in a few days.

thanks

first ad "artworks": as I said, "medium" and "size" would be pretty standard; to that I would add a field you don't yet have "collection" - those are the things you need, artist, year, medium, size, and "collection" cause you want to locate it

regarding Harvard: isn't that a bit of an overreaction? while admittedly there is some space for interpretation, universities still demand it, my university does, and thats University of London, not a small one

OK, that was an important information. I have installed Harvard Ref Anglia Ruskin University now -- because I know their Harvard style guide and used it in the past -- and the bibliography now already looks much more like I am used to it. I still have the problem with "letter" "document" and "artwork"

But with the artwork-specific thing, I think you are still too focused on something that does not exist. I do not think there exists THE reference guide that tells you exactly how-to reference artworks in Harvard framework ... or if it exists it is very specific for one publisher.

there is, what you are probably much better aware of than me, the tension between some generic solution and a very very specific solution for only one publisher or one university ... and in the meantime many users like me have to revert to doing it by hand ... there should be some way of 'middling' between too generic and too specific, especially in the case of art.

thus, I'll now have to make a list of artworks by hand copy-pasting information which I already typed into Zotero

Well, according to the rules of Goldsmiths, University of London, artworks have to be cited in the bibliography, in a separated list. I can connect you with the leading librarian if you want.

Taking as my point of orientation life-long experience as well as publications such as for instance MIT Publishing, "size" "medium" and "collection" are something everyone will need ... other things maybe are more specific, but those are the generic ones.

something else: if there is an edited publication with many different contributions, and I have both the book and the individual contributions, and then, unfortunately, I change some fields of the main publication, those changes are NOT updated in the bibliography for all the individual contributions ... this is really a problem

I recognise now that I basically have to edit the whole bibliography by hand, I have 4 days left, it's doable, but ...

@adamsmith, I am an art historian and would be pleased to work with you on this. The content and styles for art work lists are well established, published, and almost completely, uncontroversially consistent across the discipline. Consequently, while the current Art Work type in Zotero is almost completely useless, with what I imagine would be relatively little tweaking, it could, overnight, be fantastically useful to thousands of scholars.

It requires, however one slight conceptual shift. You are correct that art historians do not usually list artworks in the bibliography but they still rely (and insist) on reference lists: they just call them by different names and stick them in different places. They cite and list art works in three ways: as (non-discursive) "captions" beneath the reproduction in the text; in a "list of illustrations" in the front matter; or as a "catalogue of works" in the back matter of an exhibition catalogue. The same information, in the same style, also appears in citations (footnotes or end notes).

Captions must be thought of as citations keyed to an image rather than to a note number in running text. When they are gathered together at the back of a book-length monograph, the resulting list (completely analogous to a bibliography, excepting the ordering) is called a "catalogue" (often with 'thumbnail' illustrations). When they are gathered together at the beginning (usually with the addition of the page numbers where they appear as captions) they are called a "list of illustrations.

One significant difference with a bibliography list is that the name of the artist is given in First-Last format (like that of an author in a citation). Another significant difference is that a list of artworks is usually a numbered list, where numerical order takes precedence over alphabetical ordering by creator’s last name. So for use in preparing a particular paper or book, one would ideally want the option of creating a collection where it would be possible to enter a number in a leading number field, while more generally leaving main records sorted alphabetically. I suspect this would not be feasible within the current Zotero structure, but it would not be a deal breaker: even if the records had to be ordered and numbered by hand after output into the word processor, this would still be a huge leap forward. If one did want to include an entry in a bibliography, the last name would come first and the name would be followed by a period, but the rest of the format would probably stay as is.

The Art Type and its style should be based on the College Art Association of America’s style guide. The CAA is the world's principal professional association of art historians, art scholars, curators, and art critics. It was founded in 1911, has a membership 13,000 that is international in scope, and publishes two of world's most important art journals: _The Art Bulletin_ (historical art) and _Art Journal_ (twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and visual culture).

CAA provides the relevant artwork field categories and style formatting in the submission guidelines for _The Art Bulletin_ and _Art Journal_, under the heading “Captions.” The guidelines for the two journals are identical; here are links to each:

http://www.collegeart.org/artbulletin/guidelines-accepted
http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?page_id=71

CAA style is based on _Chicago Manual of Style_ (CMS) and so the raison d’être of the CAA guide is pretty much to deal with this issue of art works, which is almost entirely absent from CMS – but see 12.33 in CMS 16th, where the examples given are identical to the CAA in content and format.

Here is the gist of it – the first part lists the fields needed in the record type, and the second part provides the style format to be output:

[begin quote, CAA guidelines]

Captions

Captions should be numbered consecutively. Figure numbers do not include a period.
The Art Bulletin includes full caption information, whenever available and appropriate, in this order:

Figure number with no period
Artist
Title (in italics)
date
medium on support
dimensions in inches (h. x w. x d.) followed by dimensions in centimeters (1 inch = 2.54 cm)
Name of collection
City of collection
Other collection information such as “gift of . . . ,” accession number, etc.
Copyright or credit-line info regarding both the photograph and the artwork (in parentheses)

Basic Caption Style

3 Sandro Botticelli, _Primavera_, ca. 1482, tempera on panel, 6 ft. 8 in. x 10 ft. 4 in. (2.03 x 3.15 m). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (photograph provided by Scala/Art Resource, NY)

Artist, title, date, medium, and dimensions are separated by commas, and these elements are followed by a period. Collection, city, and credit lines follow, separated by commas. After this, in parentheses come all copyright and photograph credit lines. There is no terminal period, unless the basic caption information is followed by a descriptive sentence, which is only permitted in exceptional cases.

[end quote]

In the UK, the main academic association is the Association of Art Historians, founded in 1974 and representing 1400 members. The AAH publishes the journal _Art History_, which also has a style guide: download pdf here:
http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?page_id=71

See page 9: the content and format are essentially identical to that of CAA, though slightly less detailed.

The crucial fields missing from the existing item type are:

Collection
Place/city
Accession #
Donor identification
Credit info (in the case of photographic reproductions)

The current item type includes categories that are inappropriate:

Abstract
Archive
Loc. in Archive
Library Catalogue
Call number

And probably also Language. On the other hand, it would be worth adding Nationality for search purposes. Also, note that Dimensions is the professional term used, not Size.

I would be very interested in working on the project of getting a usable Art Work type developed. Even if not every aspect detailed in the foregoing is possible for various technical reasons (such as numbered ordering), moving in the direction outlined here would be a huge advance in the functionality of Zotero for uses involving the visual arts.

Another application of this would be for creating libraries of artwork ‘captions’ for inserting in PowerPoint presentations. If what I set out here is feasible, I think it could have a significant impact on new adoptions of Zotero.

ap

Yes, if we have to map onto the existing field labels, these are logical choices – are we limited (in the long run) to mapping onto the existing field labels?

For instance, the Map type has the field "Scale" and the Case type has the fields "Court," "Reporter," "History," and a bunch of others specific to it. I understand the point about generality but far more people will adopt it if it respects the terminology specific to the type of object.

One of the striking omissions in the Art Work type is Place, which even Manuscript has.

As a research tool (as well as a citation manager), it would be best to keep Collection Name and Collection Place/City separate (just as for books, Publisher and Place are separate). Also, many site-specific art works, public sculptures, and architectural works are not part of collections but do have a place that needs to be indicated – often a neighborhood as well as a city. Collection and Place should really be two different fields.

Similarly, for a separate field for Gift of / Donor: one may want to search for all the works in one's library given by the Carneigies (to different collections in different cities). It is also important for provenance research.

Actually, Provenance is a good, art historical property that is specific to art works and not usually noted about other types of items. It probably should be represented, and "Gift of" would go there. Other things indicated include: Purchased from the artist; Acquired from the estate of ...; Presented by the artist; etc.

Note also that while Americans favour Imperial measurements (with SI in parens), everyone else uses SI exclusively. But I don't expect this poses a problem.

Rights: actually, some care needed here. Older art works are all in the public domain and so the only rights at issue are those for the photographic reproduction. But for contemporary art works, we must distinguish between the reproduction rights to the art work and those of the reproduction. For instance, the artist may have retained the reproduction rights to his/her painting held in a private collection but an exhibiting museum may own the rights to the photograph of the painting used in a book.

[Edit re last point: on further thought, it is probably fine for these two different rights to be bundled together in one field: it is the text entered into the field that need to make the distinction. In CAA journals, these two kinds of rights are specified in the one set of parantheses.]

ap

OK - I'll have a look and we'll use these as we think about new fields. Generally we're not completely locked in, but there is a bias to not add too many fields, especially not type-specific fields because they make everything a mess.
I'm not going to get to this very soon, though.

Yes - if you can provide a brief summary and a link to here in that thread that'd be great.

The label change wouldn't be hard to do, no. As I say above, though, whether it's an archive or a collection depends on what type of research and what type of art you're dealing with. Also, I think it's often a good idea to keep the same field names if the field is going to be treated the same internally.

As for accession # - call #s usually aren't cited, accession #s (as are box #s in archives) apparently are. Thus loc. in archive, but that's not set in stone, obviously. If accesion #s aren't cited, I agree that they should be call numbers.

hello,

I am glad to see this development and agree with most of what aurelep says, except for the Imperial measures. It would be a very crude form of cultural imperialism if the US standard -- which is used by nobody else -- is first choice and metrical second. It would be better to have it the other way round.

The distinction between collection and archive is important ...