Classified bibliography

I am due to teach a group of French masters students in history how to use zotero at the end of the week and while preparing this I have hit a problem.
They are expected to hand in a bibliography of their subject at the end of the year - this needs to be commented and classified, i.e. organised in sub-categories with the entries in alphabetical order inside the categories.
What would be the best way to do this with zotero? I imagine they would organise their material in a collection and subcollections until they are happy with it. Would it then be best to create the bibliography in word/open office writer with headings and the entries formatted for rdf scan, and then let zotero fill in the references? At least like that they would be able to re-use and re-format the bibliography.
If anyone can think of a better way of doing this, I'd be very grateful.
Clio
  • as you know this doesn't work very well with Zotero - it's one of the issues that will be important to address in the future, as subject bibliographies are quite common in both law and history.

    I think what I would do is to use Zotero regularly for in-text citations (unless they are using a numerical style, but that seems unlikely in history) and just not insert a bibliography in Word/Ooo. WIth the items sorted in collections, I would then create the bibliographies in Zotero (Create bibliography from) and paste them to Word/Ooo.
  • Thanks for your reply. The only reason I wasn't too keen to go the route you suggest is that for the time being they won't be able to cite the reference as they really ought to (mainly due to the capital letters in surnames problem) so I was hesitant to have them essentially hard-code all the sections in their bibliography and then re-do all of that some day when they needed it again and CSL 2.0 let them cite correctly.
    I'll give it another think over and see if I can find a citation style that is close enough to be acceptable even in the long run.
  • well, but creating the bibliography from within Zotero isn't really "work" - once csl 1.0 comes out (2.0 is very distant) they can just re-create the bibliographies from their collections. shouldn't take them longer than 5mins.
  • ok, fair enough I suppose.
  • I'm interested in this as I often want to produce similar documents (classified, annotated bibliographies).

    I see how this would work with rdfscan but don't quite follow the other suggestion (generate bib and paste). Specifically how this deals with subheadings and annotations (what clio_13 calls comments in the OP). Are those done manually after generating the bib?

    FWIW I've adopted a completely different, more manual approach. I created my own in-line style that spits out a full citation, and I insert those into my bib, amid all the headings and annotations. Obviously less automated but for my needs so far this has worked well.
  • edited October 27, 2009
    I see how this would work with rdfscan but don't quite follow the other suggestion (generate bib and paste). Specifically how this deals with subheadings and annotations (what clio_13 calls comments in the OP). Are those done manually after generating the bib?
    yes, of course. Depending on what exactly is required, annotations can also be automatic, using either the abstract or the extra field, that could be coded easily in a style.

    What I'm suggesting is to create separate bibliographies for each subheading of the bibliography - not using the plugin, but using "create bibliography" in Zotero itself.
    That requires very thorough book-keeping (haha) in the library - i.e. all items must be in the appropriate collection/have the correct tag - it's very much a workaround. On the other hand, it's hard to think of a good mechanism for creating sub-bibliographies that doesn't somehow involve tags or collections.

    Edit: I just don't like solutions that assume that RTF works 100% - you will still have to dissambiguate, it might miss something etc.
  • ah, I see...

    I did think about using the abstract/extra field that way in a custom style. It would be nice to have a "canned" annotation.

    I've also tried the approach of generating bibs (or sections thereof) from collections or tagged items. But as long as I'm editing a lot of captions and commentary, I've found it just as easy to insert items one at a time as I described.

    In general I'd say this is an area where having multiple methods, and semi-manual methods, is not a bad thing. Bibliographies can get pretty complicated, with hierarchies and multiple languages/styles for instance. Difficult to cover all the use cases.
  • FWIW, I have my grad students handing in a simple annotated bibliography, and my suggestion to them was to just do it manually (copy-paste formatted bib entries + notes).
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