MARC translator uses last publication place, not first

sean and co:
This is an issue for your MARC translator which may apply more broadly. Just now, if the MARC 'publisher' line contains more than one city, Zotero takes the final one, the one before the colon. This results, for example, in many books published by Cambridge or Oxford UP getting imported into Zotero from the British Library (and my own university) something like this: "Place: New York" "Publisher: Oxford University Press". Here is an example MARC snippet which gets imported like this (see line 260):

1001 |a Kupperman, Joel.
24510 |a Classic Asian philosophy : |b a guide to the essential texts / |c Joel Kupperman.
260 |a Oxford ; |a New York : |b Oxford University Press, |c 2007.

The result is that these quintessentially British publishers (when their records get imported from the most British of libraries) have their books recorded as coming (only) from New York. Wars have surely been started over less :-)

See this record, on the other hand, also from the BL:
1001 |a Mitra, Barun K.
24510 |a Effective technical communication : |b a guide for scientists and engineers / |c Barun K. Mitra.
260 |a New Delhi ; |a Oxford : |b Oxford University Press, |c 2006.

This book is published by OUP India (by an Indian author for the Indian market), and the place of publishing gets imported as "Oxford" when---if you have to pick only one place---it presumably should be "New Delhi", the first entry.

The style guide I use (a derivative of Chicago) says to take the first publisher listed on the title page, which in these examples makes the most sense. The MARC records have here apparently preserved the original order. Some German academic styles, however, require *all* cities listed, so the capability to capture them all might be a good target to aim for eventually. (Sheesh, the complexity of bibliographic citation never ends!)
  • Thanks for the heads up. We're looking into the problem.
  • edited March 28, 2007
    scot: We have fixed this problem, and the updated translator is available now. Thanks again.
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