citing liner notes in MLA

jcmeunier
I am writing a thesis on Bob Dylan, and I have a few liner notes to cite.

In the MLA handbook, 9th edition, I find this as an example:

Race, Steve. Liner notes. Time Out, by Dave Brubeck Quartet, Columbia Records, 1959.

... with the name of the album, "Time Out," in italics.

Does anyone know in what field I need to write "liner notes," which is not supposed to be in italics?

Thank you
  • jcmeunier
    Since May, I have had a few questions on the forum, on different issues, which seem to have gone unnoticed.

    Is it possible that they may have been "skipped" because they just happened to arrive on a busy day? Should I "relaunch" them in some way?

    After 6 years of working on Zotero for my PhD (and definitely loving it, including this forum!), I am now in the final phase, and I need to hand in the whole 400 pages by the end of September, bibliography and all, so now is the worst time for me not to get assistance.

    For example, for the question above, I suppose there must be a better way than entering "Liner notes" as a prefix, which may not even be satisfactory at all.

    My other questions concerned dictionary entries and YouTube videos.

    Thank you, whoever :-)
  • dstillman
    Since May, I have had a few questions on the forum, on different issues, which seem to have gone unnoticed.
    You're asking esoteric questions about a specific citation style. Even most of the developers who work on Zotero every day generally wouldn't be able to answer those. We rely on community experts to answer most questions about citation styles.

    If you're still struggling with something after a while and haven't gotten an answer, you can post a polite follow-up in the same thread, but you should set your expectations properly for things that aren't technical questions about Zotero software (and refrain from tagging individual people). You may just have to experiment or make a note to make adjustments after unlinking your citations.

    (Looking at the MLA CSL file, I don't think there's currently a way to do this other than by using Prefix, no, but someone else could comment more authoritatively. It seems to be a very rare format in MLA references.)
  • damnation
    edited September 2, 2023
    These things fall through the cracks, especially if it's a niche and complex issue that needs a volunteer to take time and find a custom solution for you.
    Feel free to bump a thread after a few days though. That's totally fine.

    In this case, you can change the citation style by moving where the "version" macro is called. This might make other changes to your style though, so keep an eye on things.

    liner-notes

    Make sure to read this first: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step

    (CSL gang/devs. Is there a way to do something like a text inside a title field to remove italics from part of a title?)
  • dstillman
    (CSL gang/devs. Is there a way to do something like a text inside a title field to remove italics from part of a title?)
    Not sure if this is what you're asking, but <i> will invert the style's italicization. So <i>Liner notes.</i> Time Out<i>, by Dave Brubeck Quartet</i> in the Title field would give the desired style, but that's obviously quite a hack that messes up the library entry. @jcmeunier can decide whether that's easier than a custom style for now.

    Is there a way we want to try to fix this in the MLA style? It seems like we don't support the few examples of unpublished entities that require the Medium field (via the version macro) in that position.
  • jcmeunier
    @dstillman

    Sorry, I did not realise that my questions were esoteric.

    Thank you for the link to the forum guidelines. I should have read it 5 years ago. Just assumed I knew how to use a forum, I guess…

    Also, thank you for your suggestion.
    I have just experimented with it, with liner notes that have an author AND liner notes that don’t. It works just perfectly!
    I can have one library entry for the liner notes, and another for the album.
    I really don’t see how I could do this better.
    To be honest, you have really done me a great service, because my thesis is about Bob Dylan in French translation and I quote a significant amount of liner notes both in French and in English!

    @damnation

    Thank you!
    I have just had a look, it is very clear, but as you say, if I alter this, it will create other issues. In particular, I already use the “format” field to indicate if it is an LP or a CD, or 7”…

    I think the other solution suggested is not too much of a hassle to deal with, as it probably concerns 10 or 20 library entries only.

    Thank you both for your time. This is really precious!
  • adamsmith
    Yeah, sorry, I did see your questions, so they didn't go unnoticed, but don't have the 9th edition of MLA here and the 8th edition doesn't have a lot of these details, so it's a bit tricky to handle these (plus, yes, while I wouldn't call your questions esoteric, they are for relatively uncommon scenarios in a fairly complex style, so it's not like I can punch out an answer in a couple of minutes).
  • jcmeunier
    @adamsmith
    No problem. I understand. I am very happy that there is a solution, honestly.

    For the other stuff (YouTube / Dictionary Entry), I will just try a few fields (I have already done a bit of testing), and if it doesn't work, my work will not be perfect, but still 100 times better with Zotero than without it ;-)

    Actually, I haven't looked into that, yet, but maybe I could use the same trick for my dictionary thing. I can't remember what it was exactly, at the moment...
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