plain text item type?
I'd like to enter an archival box number as a zotero item. It should neither be in quotes nor italics, rather should appear in the footnote just as I type it. It seems, fantastically, that all item types are either put in quotes or italics. Am I missing something? Could I easily create my own item type based on another but without the italic or quotes?
I use Chicago full note with bibliography and would prefer to keep it.
I use Chicago full note with bibliography and would prefer to keep it.
If that's not the case, please provide documentation and we'll change this globally for CMoS.
Now, obviously you can change that - unfortunately, you've picked the single most complicated style in Zoteroland, so "easy" is going to be in relative terms.
Here are general instructions for style edits:
http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits
The quotation marks are added with quotes="true"
something is put in italics with font-style="italic"
You'll probably have to put a simple conditional loop, testing for an item type (manuscript, perhaps?) in each of the macros that define the title (title-note, title-short, and title).
Archival materials and their correct citation has been a recurrent problematic point for users, and I think part of it is because the ideas of box number and so on are highly dependent on the archive and country of research. My approach for archival items has been to enter them as the item type that they actually represent (letter, document, report), then add the archival location in that field. To cite them, I enter the f. #W, op. #X, d. #Y, ll. #Z (the Russian system for organizing archives) as the page number (more abstractly, locator) in the word processor plugin. Since there isn't anything approaching a single standard for archival locators, this will always require some careful massaging by end users.
adamsmith: yes, Chicago has italics for full published works, and quotes for parts of published works, names of files, and letters. For archive box numbers, Chicago takes neither quotes nor italics anywhere in the note.
that way they won't get quotation marks around them.
Also that's what the field is for.
You could certainly make just one item for the box (but, again, put that in the Loc. in Archive field) and then work with prefix-suffix. But I guess I just don't fully understand what you're trying to get as a final result, so some examples would really help.
Edit: Also, is this for the first or subsequent citations of an item?
If you really just want to have the box number and not maintain details on the specifics of the manuscripts from within Zotero, then just add additional endnotes or footnotes manually for those items, without using Zotero. If you use Zotero citations, you'll end up with an extraneous entry in your bibliography for Box X anyway, since archives are not usually included in the primary bibliography.
Remember that Zotero is not just about making pretty citations-- that's just gravy. The main goal is organizing research-- and archival boxes aren't a very coherent level of organization. The thought, at some level, is that if your research is well-organized, then you can trivially create bibliographies.
thank you.
Still, I think your problem most likely has an easy solution - either with a quick fix in the style of depending on which field you put the data in - but I really don't fully understand what it is you want - so you could make this much quicker with some examples.
Problem solved.
My next problem is how to automate the bibliography so that only certain types of items are included, but that can wait.