Styling archival material

tsherratt
There's already been some discussion of this, but as I'm trying to write some styles at the moment I wanted to try and be clear where things currently stand, and where they might be going.

First of all, I noticed that the Chicago styles reference the variable 'archive-place' -- is that mapped to anywhere in Zotero? I couldn't find it, but it would be useful.

The discussion above talks about the forthcoming hierarchical data model -- what's the status of this? It would certainly make the capture/citation of archival material much easier, as what's lacking at the moment is any way of indicating that a document/record is part of a larger aggregation, be it a collection or a series (particularly 'series' in the Australian sense, where individually registered series provide the basis for intellectual control). It seems that this would be possible under the hierarchical model, though it would be good if this would also include a collection/series number, separate from the 'Loc. in Archive' field.

If this was implemented, how would the styling work? Could a citation of a document pull in the title of the series that contains it? Could a bibliography list a series number/title, followed by all the items within that series?

There's also a broader question about archives and bibliographies. In most cases (in my experience anyway), bibliographies list unpublished sources separately from published sources. Is there some way of looping through the citations twice, pulling out all the manscripts first, and then doing the rest?

Lastly (sorry for the long post), it is common practice (certainly in Australian journals) to abbreviate the repository name in subsequent citations, eg:

First ref - National Archives of Australia (NAA): A821, 1947/3450
Subsequent - NAA: A821, 1947/3450

Is it possible to include a short name for a repository to make this possible? In the style I'm writing at the moment I'm resorting to a lot of conditionals to try and achieve this, but that's hardly satisfactory.

Having said all that, I must add that the citation stuff is much less important to me personally than Zotero's ability to help me manage my archival research. For me that's where the power and the excitement are, but if I'm going to promote it in the archives/history fields in Australia I feel I need to get on top of the citation stuff as well.

Thanks, Tim
  • bdarcus
    edited May 20, 2008
    Will let Dan comment on the first bit, but from the styling perspective of CSL (which is not specific to Zotero) ...
    If this was implemented, how would the styling work? Could a citation of a document pull in the title of the series that contains it?
    Yes.
    Could a bibliography list a series number/title, ...
    Yes.
    ...followed by all the items within that series?
    No. The CSL model has a hierarchy, but it's really one-way; e.g. you can go from item to collection (e.g. series) but not the other way. One never cites series, after all.
    There's also a broader question about archives and bibliographies. In most cases (in my experience anyway), bibliographies list unpublished sources separately from published sources. Is there some way of looping through the citations twice, pulling out all the manscripts first, and then doing the rest?
    This was in earlier versions of CSL, but a) was never implemented anywhere, and b) dropped out in recent changes. It's not that trivial to do, but I'd in any case like to add it back.
    Lastly (sorry for the long post), it is common practice (certainly in Australian journals) to abbreviate the repository name in subsequent citations, eg:

    First ref - National Archives of Australia (NAA): A821, 1947/3450
    Subsequent - NAA: A821, 1947/3450

    Is it possible to include a short name for a repository to make this possible? In the style I'm writing at the moment I'm resorting to a lot of conditionals to try and achieve this, but that's hardly satisfactory.
    Another "have discussed previously, but never resolved; it's hard" issue.
  • tsherratt
    Thanks for the clarification!
    No. The CSL model has a hierarchy, but it's really one-way; e.g. you can go from item to collection (e.g. series) but not the other way. One never cites series, after all.
    Perhaps not, but under the Australian Series System you are likely to be citing a number of files from a series, and the preferred way of styling that in a bibliography would be something like:

    National Archives of Australia: A1, General correspondence (Department of the Interior)

    1913/4567, 'Building of Canberra', 1913-1925
    1910/5987, 'Mount Stromlo Observatory', 1910-1936
    1928/89922, 'Australian Institute of Anatomy', 1928-1945

    National Archives of Australia: A6556, Surveillance files (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation)

    B22343, 'Sherratt, Tim', 1987-1998
    B33443, 'My cat Humpty', 2001-2007

    Actually the National Archives suggested citation styles are more complex than that, but I think they need to be simplified somewhat.

    Anyway, seems like it's beyond reach at the moment.
  • erazlogo
    edited May 21, 2008
    First of all, I noticed that the Chicago styles reference the variable 'archive-place' -- is that mapped to anywhere in Zotero? I couldn't find it, but it would be useful.
    No, but it should be there in the hierarchical model.
    Lastly (sorry for the long post), it is common practice (certainly in Australian journals) to abbreviate the repository name in subsequent citations, eg:

    First ref - National Archives of Australia (NAA): A821, 1947/3450
    Subsequent - NAA: A821, 1947/3450

    Is it possible to include a short name for a repository to make this possible? In the style I'm writing at the moment I'm resorting to a lot of conditionals to try and achieve this, but that's hardly satisfactory.
    This should also be possible in the hierarchical model--Zotero could just add an equivalent of a Short Title field for archives and then map it to the "short" form of the "archive" variable in CSL.

    Both changes could be easily accomplished if there is an "archival collection" item type, which is currently being considered for the hierarchical model. Not sure what the time frame is for implementing that though.
  • bdarcus
    Both changes could be easily accomplished if there is an "archival collection" item type
    Except it'd be a "collection" (rather than "item") type; right?
  • bdarcus
    Re:
    National Archives of Australia: A1, General correspondence (Department of the Interior)

    1913/4567, 'Building of Canberra', 1913-1925
    1910/5987, 'Mount Stromlo Observatory', 1910-1936
    1928/89922, 'Australian Institute of Anatomy', 1928-1945
    I don't think this is a standard citation, but rather more akin to the sort of grouping by class of type that you asked for at the top.

    Quick question: are examples like this sorted within the primary bibliography, or do they get set off in their own section (maybe "primary sources" or some such)?
  • erazlogo
    edited May 21, 2008
    "Both changes could be easily accomplished if there is an "archival collection" item type"

    Except it'd be a "collection" (rather than "item") type; right?
    Yes, a subclass of collection in the bibliographic ontology, but an "item" with specific fields in Zotero, so that it could be formatted properly in CSL, as above (see also more examples of how archival collections are cited in bibliographies).
  • bdarcus
    edited May 21, 2008
    Right, in that thread, I'm saying the same thing I'm saying here, which is that I don't think Tim is really citing a collection. Rather, he's wanting to have a section of a bibliography that lists collections, and their associated items. I've seen similar examples where people list, say, legal cases before the main reference sources, or ones where people need to group by author*.

    Just to give you a sense of what I'm talking about WRT to implementation details, in earlier versions of CSL, we had stuff something like:

    <group by="author">
    ...
    </group>
    As I said in that other thread, the details are tricky here, and I'm not exactly sure how you'd achieve this (and been a long time since I've thought about it). Maybe something like:

    <group by="collection">
    ...
    </group>

    * In truth, a standard author-date sorted bibliography is implicitly grouped by author.
  • erazlogo
    edited May 21, 2008
    Right, in that thread, I'm saying the same thing I'm saying here, which is that I don't think Tim is really citing a collection. Rather, he's wanting to have a section of a bibliography that lists collections, and their associated items... As I said in that other thread, the details are tricky here, and I'm not exactly sure how you'd achieve this.
    Right, I'm not sure CSL can cover all the possible cases of bibliographies by section, but in this case it may be possible. In Tim's case, "group by collection" means that the collection name goes first, then all associated primary sources. In Chicago (see my examples above), it would mean that the section contains collection names only, with all primary sources omitted. Simon had mentioned at one point that the Chicago behavior may be possible to achieve in Zotero. But if there are variations in other styles on citing archival collections, CSL would have to provide a way to choose between "cite collections only" and "cite collections followed by items" formats. In theory, it is possible to create extra CSL parameters for such cases:

    <option name="group-archives" value="true"/>
    <option name="group-archives-include-items" value="true"/>


    At a minimum, a user should be able to generate a bibliography from Zotero by choosing "Generate bibliography from selected items" or by dragging and dropping items into a document, then creating sections manually. This means that CSL should be able to format archival collections and primary sources individually at least.
  • erazlogo
    edited May 21, 2008
    Added a ticket so this issue doesn't get lost amid more pressing matters.
  • breckenr
    edited June 2, 2008
    The South African national archives system is unusually systematic (one of the benefits of Verwoerd's science obsessed state), and built around an early IBM document management system originally called STAIRS (now NAIRS). It's a very large flat file system, and the results are available for all depositories at http://www.national.archsrch.gov.za/sm300cv/smws/sm300dl Here's an example:

    DEPOT SAB (these are national archive depots)
    SOURCE NTS (this is the government department, in this case Native Affairs)
    TYPE LEER (leer means file, the other types are photos & audio tapes)
    VOLUME_NO 10628 (this is the box number)
    SYSTEM 01 (no idea what this is supposed to refer to)
    REFERENCE 66373 (this is the file reference, derived from the Colonial Office minute number)
    PART 1 (multi-volume files)
    DESCRIPTION MAINTENANCE GRANTS. MANDELA. (Text description of the file)
    STARTING 1949 (obvious)
    ENDING 1962 (ditto)

    I'd be surprised if this system doesn't have close relatives in the PRO and the US National Archives given its origins at IBM. (Certainly the archive structure is closely tied to the 19th century archival systems derived in Britian). It would be very helpful (revolutionary is probably too strong a word) to have a document type that would match this structure more powerfully than the current manuscript type. This is not something limited to historical research, it's key to large numbers of social scientists who work on state policy.

    Thanks again for a marvelous tool.
    k
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