How to enter archival material?
While Zotero gives a lengthy list of source types, it does not include "archives" or "archival material." If I want to enter something like the papers of Alexander Bittelman at the Tamiment Library at NYU, what's the best way for me to do that? I would like it to format (based on CMOS) as:
Papers of Alexander Bittelman, Tamiment Library, New York University.
Also, is there some way that we could suggest to the wonderful Zotero designers that they include "archival material" as a source in future upgrades?
Papers of Alexander Bittelman, Tamiment Library, New York University.
Also, is there some way that we could suggest to the wonderful Zotero designers that they include "archival material" as a source in future upgrades?
Zotero has a category for each of these and fields for Archive and Location in Archive that allow you to include all information necessary. While not all citation styles fully support Archival citations, CMoS does.
Treat "papers" in an archive as "Mansucript" - which for bibliographical purposes they are: unpublished written works, the type of which you can specify in the "type" field. You can adapt that for whole collections (as in your example) or for individual items in a collection.
For sorting and categorizing items in your database, you can use tags and collections.
14.241 Examples of bibliography entries for manuscript collections
The style of the first six examples below is appropriate if more than one item from a collection is cited in the text or notes. In the second and third examples, commas are added after the initials to avoid misreading. See also 14.233.
Egmont Manuscripts. Phillipps Collection. University of Georgia Library.
House, Edward M., Papers. Yale University Library.
Merriam, Charles E., Papers. University of Chicago Library.
Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Papers. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Strother, French, and Edward Lowry. Undated correspondence. Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, IA.
Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform. Papers. Alice Belin du Pont files, Pierre S. du Pont Papers. Eleutherian Mills Historical Library, Wilmington, DE.
You can get around the quotation marks by putting the collection name into the type field and leaving the title empty. Since the title is often a description of the type of content that's not completely far-fetched, though I won't deny that it's a bit of a hack.
I don't have anything on the date, though, (i.e. how to get rid of the n.d.) and I'm not quite sure how we can fix that. I'll see if I can find one of the historians to adivse.
I had forgotten about this, but archival collection has been requested a long time ago and chances are it will make it into Zotero
https://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/issues/27
As someone who requires students to use Zotero--after touting all its many advantages--it's frustrating to have to tell them that archival collections have to be manually entered.
Again, many thanks for all you're doing for us!
E.g.
Contrat de mariage entre Louis Denis et Marie Bellesme (Contrat de mariage entre Louis Denis et Marie Bellesme, January 20, 1666), Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, Étude XXVI/110.