At this point, you have a very large burden to prove that there's a need for this that justifies the rather significant UI, data layer, and styling changes that would be required to support it.

In German, it is common to use a period between the main title and the subtitle.

Can you be more specific. How "common" is it? Is it uncommon, or broadly understood as incorrect, to use colons as the delimiter?

Anyway, one would come up with two separate fields in CSL... For some bibliography styles, it is important to have control over the formating of the title/subtitle.

Haven't we been through this sort of thing before, where you ask for new features without any concrete evidence they're needed? Examples please.

MODS already has separate fields for main title and subtitle, as does biblatex.

But the vast bulk of existing practice is in favor of a single field (RIS, Refer, DC, BibTeX, CSL). It also makes it harder to handle some other important features (say different kinds of titles) when you split them.

Also, both CSL, Zotero, and BIBO (Zotero's preferred import/export format) all have support for a notion of a "short title", which is typically the title sans subtitle.

But Frederik, at least KZfSS doesn't care if you use period or colon.
here a couple of citations from a recent article (Höpner, M.; Jackson, G. Das deutsche System der Corporate Governance zwischen Persistenz und Konvergenz. KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 2002, 54, 362-368).

There is no pattern here. Seems like they are OK with whatever the original title is. Which seems eminently reasonable to me.

Jackson, Gregory, 2001: Organizing the Firm: Corporate Governance in Germany and Japan, 1870–2000. Dissertation, New York, NY: Columbia University.

Jong, Henk Wouter de, 1997: The Governance Structure and Performance of Large European Corporations, The Journal of Management and Governance 1: 5–27.

Kurdelbusch, Antje, 2002: The Rise of Variable Pay in Germany. Evidence and Explanations. In: Anthony Ferner (Hg.): Special Issue of „European Journal of Industrial Relations“ on Multinational Companies and Globalisation (im Erscheinen).

Thelen, Kathleen, 2002: How Institutions Evolve: Insights from Comparative-Historical Analysis. In: James Mahoney und Dietrich Rueschemeyer (Hg.): Comparative-Historical Analysis: Innovations in Theory and Method. New York: Cambridge University Press (im Erscheinen).

Thelen, Kathleen, und Sven Steinmo, 1992: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics. S. 1–32 in: Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen und Frank Longstreth (Hg.): Structuring Politics. Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press,.
Wójcik, Dariusz, 2001: Change in the German Model of Corporate Governance: Evidence from Blockholdings, 1997–2001. Oxford: School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford (unveröffentlicht).

felwert,

We're all keen to see title/subtitle correctly supported for German publications; the question is just how best to go about it. As Bruce points out, some pretty sweeping changes would be necessary to split titles into two fields, and then correctly handle the result. Titles from most repositories would need to be correctly split (i.e. when the translator is run to capture the cite data), and during manual entry, users would need to use the two fields correctly. The change might actually make things less reliable overall, rather than more. It would certainly mean more typing for everyone.

If a single title field can be split reliably into the correct two parts by the CSL processor, we can accomplish the same result (i.e. printing a period between title and subtitle in German styles, and a colon in English styles), without any changes to the database or to Zotero -- and fewer changes to existing kit means an earlier solution.

At the moment, Zotero doesn't do this, so to cope, you have curated your database with periods between the two elements. Many other German-speaking users will have done the same. It might be that a colon provides a more reliable hint that the field should be split, but let's start by looking at whether there are titles that _cannot_ be split correctly by breaking on the first period. Looking at your database, are there any such titles?

If you can identify "difficult" titles, let's see if we can work out a way to handle the split correctly. If that can be settled, the next step is easy -- we'll add the title delimiter issue to the todo list for CSL development, and once it's been added to the CSL specfication, I'll add the necessary support to the upcoming CSL processor for Zotero.

Meanwhile, please tell your boss that we're interested in resolving this issue for German users, but that splitting the title across two fields in the database mask might not be part of the solution.

I would add that the Chicago style (at least) stipulates that title citations of foreign works follow the conventions of the work's native language: in other words, for publication in English, not only wouldn't you have to change a German title's punctuation, you shouldn't do so. I just looked this up yesterday--and by the way, this is one reason being able to turn off auto-capitalization is a great option. I wish it weren't a hidden option, so more people could take advantage of it.

fbennett,

thanks for your reply. I fully understand that introducing a new field has quite much impact, and so it might not be worth the trouble. I thought that having separate fields is an easier solution in the end, and that it also could be used optional (if one puts everything into the title field, it doesn’t matter as long as you don’t need the features discussed here). But I might be perfectly wrong, it was just my view on the issue.

And I think that it is more valuable to have a well-thought-out solution in the end, than making quick changes which might turn out as inappropriate. So everything I write is pure brainstorming, everything can be dismissed in the end.

What I think should be considered when trying to solve this issue:

• It might not only be about punctuation. I have seen cases where, e.g., the main title is printed in italics, while the subtitle is printed normal. This is probably only an issue for strange German traditions, but one might consider this.
  
• A title might have more than main title and subtitle, but also a title addon. This is the case for Festschriften. (see this example). There you have the main title (Das Auge Des Betrachters), a subtitle (Beitrage Zum Konstruktivismus) and a title addon (Festschrift für Heinz von Foerster). This is not so uncommon in German publications.
  

I skipped through my library, and it seems that splitting at the first period is in deed problematic in some cases, e.g., abrreviations, like this: »Immigrant Religion in the U.S. and Western Europe: Bridge or Barrier to Inclusion?«. Splitting at the first period would split after U. Considering period-space as a delimiter, one would split after U.S. In this case, one could split after a period only if the title contains no colon, but what for German titles with abbreviations and periods as delimiter?

Also, question marks can be used as delimiters, as in »Ghettos oder ethnische Kolonien? Entwicklungschancen von Stadtteilen mit hohem Zuwandereranteil«, but I think this is also true for English resources and should be less problematic.

But I think it would be better to migrate the library once to using only a colon as a delimiter than having an unreliable solution. But this means that it must be known that the colon has a special meaning, and that one should not use a period in titles. That relates to the issue of how one could teach people about special »micro-syntax« used in Zotero’s fields for parsing, which was raised in the topic I linked in my first post.

I hope I didn’t come up with too much to think about. Just ignore whatever you consider irrelevant with regard to the original issue.

Cheers,
Frederik

addamsmith, MG6:

If we have the situation that some styles require the delimiters to be normalized, while some require the original delimiters to be used, then I think we end up at the very edge of Zoteros localization capabilities. This has to my knowledge already been discussed for quotes: The very idea of quoting in CSL was that quotes should be localized to the current locale (I’m not sure if this is already implemented).

But there are styles which require German titles to use German quotes, and English titles to use English quotes. The same seems to hold true for some styles and title delimiters. This would require language-awareness on a per-title basis. That was discussed for quotes but rejected as being too complicated to implement.

So if one wants serious localization capabilities which get many of the even complicated corner-cases, one should probably stick to LaTeX/biblatex. But it would be nice if Zotero could be used to manage one’s collection and bibtex files only be exported when actually writing papers. This does, in turn, require that Zotero is capable of exporting various BibTeX dialects, including biblatex, which requires to separate parts of the title. So there we are again.

But Frederik - separate fields - while nice for select biblatex users - doesn't work for CMOS - perhaps the most widely used style overall.
So if there is a trade-off between the two, I think we'd want to go with the one that keeps CMOS correct and intact.

Adam, your right. To have the least impact, it will probably best to use some smart kind of title parsing that requires no changes to existant titles. That should keep everything working that works now.

So probably one could live with something along these lines:

1. If the title contains a question mark, split at the (first) question mark.
   
2. If the title contains a colon, split at the (first) colon.
   
3. If the title contains a period, split at the (first) period.
   

The only corner case would be titles which contain abbreviations and use periods as delimiters. But I think it is ok to change these to using a colon instead.

I just mean the notion there's a sweet spot of functionality vs. effort, and that going beyond often involves unreasonable effort for minimal gains. It's related to other ideas such as the evils of premature optimization I suppose.

For CSL, every feature we add, and every corner case we decide to cover, means additional work for implementers, and so less likelihood we'll see libraries finished (which is already a problem), and in turn applications built on top of them.

Multilingual layering will be another exciting can of worms to tackle, but I don't think we need to worry about it here. This one just boils down to three possible choices for a delimiter: force-colon, force-period, or use-original.

is that ever cited formally? If not - in the notes.

Really? It certainly shouldn't be in the short title field, if anything it seems like a short version of the authors - I think this is probably sufficiently rare and idiosyncratic to remain in the "let the user fix this at the end" category of things, but if you can find a style guide that actually requires that practice that may change people's mind.

Not sure why these issues should be addressed in this thread, though?
Zotero should work in a way that if you have the correct data you get the correct citation output. That's really all it can do - but I do think it should try to come as closely as possible to that ideal.
For an end user that may mean occasional fixing of items in the database that have, e.g. been poorly imported - but that is a one-time operation - much preferable to doing the same thing every time I cite the same source.

And sure, people should proofread their stuff - but I think the fewer manual editing necessary the better, no?

I came across this discussion, searching for a way to circumvent the fact that I didn't find a mean to get the "short title" field.

You mean in CSL styles? You can simply use <text variable="title" form="short"/> That should print the short title.

But this is not really related to the issue of having main and subtitle separated.

I enter this conversation as an ally of Felwert. I also call for future versions of Zotero to distinguish titles from subtitles by separating the fields.

1. Contra CM6's claim above, Chicago stipulates that English-language publications need not follow European conventions for subtitles. See CMS 14.97-98. Indeed, many presses insist that their own national conventions be observed on this point, even for citations of material published in a different linguistic tradition. In my experience this line is followed by most presses, nationality aside. And those presses that don't are eclectic in other places where they clearly conflict with Zotero's policy. E.g., they publish bibliographies with a mix of punctuation devices: chevrons around French article titles; American quotes around American-published titles; single quotes around UK-published titles; upside-down opening quotes for German titles, etc.


2. TEI recognizes the standard. The element <title> includes as recognized values for the attribute @type both "main" and "subtitle".


3. Zotero has always pursued a policy of trying to get out of the fields anything pertaining to metainformation. The punctuation and spacing separating title from subtitle are elements of metapunctuation; they are not intristic to the titles themselves. This is demonstrated by the great number of books that omit on their cover or title page any punctuation delimiting title from subtitle. If the colon or period were really a part of the title, it would appear everywhere all the time.


4. Capitalization of a subtitle or subsubtitle is oftentimes dictated by style concerns. Zotero users should not be forced to declare whether a (sub)subtitle should or should not begin with a capital letter. That's a style call.


5. Short titles cannot be used for this purpose, since that field is frequently being used for other purposes (such as taming the length of an overly long main title).


6. I work at a press that has a regularizing policy, and a number of my authors have resisted or fought our press's editorial policy on this point. Those same critics have usually not considered the important distinction between metapunctuation and intrinsic punctuation. This should be a non-issue. Publishers, like Zotero, are leaning toward publication models that allow readers to view bibliographic data as they wish. The only way to effectively employ this strategy, however, is if main and subtitle fields can be distinguished. Then those who dislike colons can be as happy as those who prefer them.

I'm willing to go further, and say that we need not only a subtitle field, but a sub-subtitle and a sub-sub-subtitle field. Yes, I have seen books with four levels of titles. They are usually horribly edited and dreadful to read. But there they are.

Someone may counter that sometimes one needs to record in a Zotero record what national convention has been followed. That is easily accommodated by faithfully keeping the language field up to date.

To those who suggest that such a fix would be a heck of a lot of work, I would encourage a long view of things. It doesn't need to happen now. But it needs to happen eventually. The compelling need is already starting to build up a head of steam as more and more publications in the humanities (where people are passionate about punctuation) take to the Web. Developers should plan accordingly.