Report Item Type

DAG
Outstanding Product!

Our database makes a distinction between, and allows, multiple personal authors which seem to be handled almost correctly (why the final period in an authors initial is stripped is one question I have), but what about multiple Corporate authors??

These can not be tagged as <dc.publisher> as we may have a separate one of those as well. The Report Item Type has a field labeled "Institution"; what tag is used for this and can it be made repeatable?

Perhaps Corporate authors could be imported into a repeatable <dc.contributor> field?
  • dstillman
    A corporate/institutional author field would simply be an extension of the current creator support, not a separate field like Institution (which could probably be removed). Institutional creator support has been discussed, and the additional metadata would be nice, but I don't believe there'd be much of a practical difference (e.g., in style support) between an institutional creator and a regular creator with no first name (which is also equivalent to a creator using single-field mode). Am I overlooking something?

    In other words, if your concern is just getting institutional creators into Zotero, you should be able to treat them like any other creator (though it's possible that some of the translators don't handle this well). If you'd like to encode them in Embedded RDF or another format in a particular way, Zotero would need import support for that. If you'd like Zotero to preserve the institutional designation and export the data accordingly, Zotero would need expanded creator support.
  • DAG
    a regular creator with no first name (which is also equivalent to a creator using single-field mode). Am I overlooking something?

    Fair enough. Is there a way to get Zotero to ignore processing a comma (all punctuation for that matter) in creator content and import the whole institutional name into the lastname field? For example,

    Canada West Biosciences, Calgary ALTA (CAN)
  • DAG
    >but I don't believe there'd be much of a practical difference (e.g., in style support)
    >between an institutional creator and a regular creator with no first name (which is
    >also equivalent to a creator using single-field mode). Am I overlooking something?

    I just noticed that although the "institutional creator" can be imported just like a "personal author" with no first name, Zotero RDF exports the field marked up as a FOAF schema:Person.surname which sort of corrupts/violates what the FOAF spec calls for in that field.

    FOAF does have a foaf:Organization field and both a foaf:workplaceHomepage and a foaf:workInfoHomepage for relating a Person to his/her employer; PRISM (also referenced in Zotero RDF) has prism:corporateEntity. So at least these two schemas see a practical use for an institution associated with whatever resource they happen to be referring to.

    So the "praticality" has to come into play before the style support is considered (output), i.e. how can users get a Corporate Entity/Author into an Item Type that will preserve that data (and not transform it into some random tag) so it can be easily and logically identified if required in a particular style.
  • dstillman
    I was referring to a practical difference within Zotero itself (including bibliographic output), but yes, certainly for export the additional metadata would be helpful.

    I've created a ticket for institutional creator support so this doesn't get lost, but I don't know when it will get done.

    Regarding your question about commas above, it would depend on the import translator, but I'm not sure any support embedded commas without parsing. We'd be happy to fix this where people have suggestions, but aside from RDF, where there are various options, I'm not sure what conventions there are in the other formats for handling institutional creators. For example, from a quick glance at the RIS spec, there doesn't seem to be a way to differentiate between "Smith, John" and "Canada West Biosciences, Calgary ALTA (CAN)" in RIS. On the other hand, as far as I know, the BibTeX translator shouldn't be parsing "{Canada West Biosciences, Calgary ALTA (CAN)}" (surrounded by braces) into first and last names and should instead import it as a single-field creator.
  • erazlogo
    edited November 28, 2008
    A corporate/institutional author field would simply be an extension of the current creator support, not a separate field like Institution (which could probably be removed).
    Dan--please leave the current "institution" field for citations such as the examples below (Maybe rename as "publisher"? As you can see, institution here is cited in place of a "publisher" rather than creator--these are defined as "freestanding publications" in CMS 15):

    Hazel V. Clark, Mesopotamia: Between Two Rivers (Mesopotamia, OH: End of the Commons General Store, [1957?]).
    Lifestyles in Retirement, Library Series (New York: TIAA-CREF, 1996).

    http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/ch17/ch17_sec241.html
  • dstillman
    Elena: Got it, thanks. ('Institution' is indeed mapped to 'Publisher'.)
  • fbennett
    Note that in Zotero 2.1, citeproc-js treats single-field input as an institutional author, as suggested by Dan above, with appropriate adjustments to joins and punctuation as requested by DAG.
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