Styling archival material
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 In most cases (in my experience anyway), bibliographies list unpublished sources separately from published sources.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
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
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.
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.
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)?
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.
<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.
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