Upgrade StorageCMOS and Quotations Marks for Unofficial Manuscript or Document Titles
CMOS 17 states this about manuscript titles:
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In notes and bibliographies, quotation marks are used only for specific titles (e.g., “Canoeing through Northern Minnesota”), but not for generic names such as report or minutes. Generic names of this kind are capitalized if part of a formal heading actually appearing on the manuscript, lowercased if merely descriptive. Compare 14.229, example notes 7–10.
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Many manuscripts and documents encountered by historians are untitled and the researcher must put an unofficial title in (or say "untitled"). Or, as above, we might use the generic "report." I usually use a descriptive title. Zotero puts anything in the title field for Documents and Manuscripts into quotation marks. If Zotero did not force the quotations marks, they could be entered by the user and no extra work would be required on cleanup at publication. And everything would look neat and clean in Zotero. But if you are using an unofficial title, you have to hack the program to flag that the item should not have quotation marks. (I put the unofficial title in brackets.) Why not let all titles of these types have no quotation marks unless entered by the user? Or have a flag beside the field that lets the user choose, since CMOS requires a choice to be made? Or, using CMOS's requirement, can Zotero recognize that the user is using a lower-case title and when found, remove quotation marks?
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In notes and bibliographies, quotation marks are used only for specific titles (e.g., “Canoeing through Northern Minnesota”), but not for generic names such as report or minutes. Generic names of this kind are capitalized if part of a formal heading actually appearing on the manuscript, lowercased if merely descriptive. Compare 14.229, example notes 7–10.
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Many manuscripts and documents encountered by historians are untitled and the researcher must put an unofficial title in (or say "untitled"). Or, as above, we might use the generic "report." I usually use a descriptive title. Zotero puts anything in the title field for Documents and Manuscripts into quotation marks. If Zotero did not force the quotations marks, they could be entered by the user and no extra work would be required on cleanup at publication. And everything would look neat and clean in Zotero. But if you are using an unofficial title, you have to hack the program to flag that the item should not have quotation marks. (I put the unofficial title in brackets.) Why not let all titles of these types have no quotation marks unless entered by the user? Or have a flag beside the field that lets the user choose, since CMOS requires a choice to be made? Or, using CMOS's requirement, can Zotero recognize that the user is using a lower-case title and when found, remove quotation marks?
We almost certainly won't do this: because citation style specific data entry isn't something I'd want to encourage and not all styles handle titled manuscripts the same way Chicago does. Currently Zotero doesn't have any such flags, so that'd be significant design departure. CSL also doesn't have any way to handle this. Also won't work, since CSL doesn't look at the content of variables at all.
We can see if it's possible to make the distinction based on item types (document vs. manuscript, say), but that seems cluncky, too, so currently I don't have a good idea on how to handle this.
Thanks!
<else-if type="legal_case interview patent" match="any"><text variable="title"/>
</else-if>
Both times, change the first line to
<else-if type="legal_case interview patent manuscript document" match="any">For subsequent citation a little further down there is
<else-if type="patent interview" match="any"><text variable="title" form="short"/>
</else-if>
Change the first line to
<else-if type="patent interview document manuscript" match="any">
General instructions here:
https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step
read those closely & don't miss the part about changing ID and title
Most of the manuscript documents that I cite are untitled primary documents. I followed Adam's advice above to modify the CMOS long-note style so that now manuscript titles are not quoted or forced to title case. It works well. But it means that any titled manuscripts that I do cite will have to be manually updated once the citations and bibliographies are added and unlinked from the final document. It's one, or the other.
[not sure how to invoke quote style here]
Or have a flag beside the field that lets the user choose, since CMOS requires a choice to be made?
Currently Zotero doesn't have any such flags, so that'd be significant design departure. CSL also doesn't have any way to handle this.
[end quote]
I still wonder why we can't have a simple tick-box next to the title field, labeled "Descriptive title" or somesuch. In looking at the code it's not clear to me why this would be an issue. Is the concern more with the user interface? That it might open a can of worms? I understand the need for strict design standards, but still. Maybe the design standards should be reconsidered if they can't accommodate CMOS style.
(Seems this will be even more of an issue with CMOS 18.)
I'm still new to Zotero. An amazing tool -- thank you to all the talented people who volunteer their time to work on it.