You wrote, "and looking at these examples they might not be 100% possible, but starting with Chicago Manual of style it would likely be possible to get pretty close."
I'm hopeful our team will make good progress. Separately, though, we don't want to redevelop Mills work. While it's far from the only reason, in addition to the TMG and RootsMagic genealogical software applications Steve mentioned, Legacy Family Tree and both Family Tree Maker and Family Tree Maker for Mac support the Evidence Explained styles.
We want to bring more consistency to the labels Mills used, and strike a balance in how we might approach reducing the sheer volume of labels. For example, maybe we don't generally need "author" distinguished from "blog author," but we might want the element "Bible ID (original owner and inclusive dates)."
As above, I hope our team makes good progress and strikes a balance that will work for Zotero as well. --GJ
We want to bring more consistency to the labels Mills used, and strike a balance in how we might approach reducing the sheer volume of labels.
clearly that's the only way this is ever going to work for Zotero. Neither Zotero nor CSL - the language that structures Zotero's citation output - will drastically increase the number of item types or fields. I strongly suspect that most, if not all, primary documents can be covered using three or four item types and relatively generic fields. If that's not the case for what genealogists want, then Zotero is likely the wrong tool for the field. I'm pointing this out to prevent people from developing wrong expectation. While the Zotero team is certainly willing to adapt the tool to scholars' needs, there are limits. If, for example, you decide that Zotero needs 5 new item types and 6 new fields to be useful for genealogists, I am relatively certain that that wouldn't happen.
Is there a non-tech presentation of the Zotero item types? Fields?
You wrote, "I am relatively certain that that wouldn't happen..."
As with my earlier comment, I understood it's more than just showing examples of _Evidence Explained_ citations for genealogy.
While the templates in _Evidence Explained_ are somewhat US centric, our group has a global focus. --GJ
To clarify my prior comments - there are two different issues: A citation style for genealogy can be as ideosyncratic and specific as people want: There are hundreds of citation styles already and, except for writing the style, the costs of having a style specifically designed for genealogy (or, for that matter, a subset of genealogy) are zero. That's where I offered to help.
The second issue are field and item type requests. I can't do anything about those anyway, (I'm neither a Zotero core developer nor on the csl dev team), but I understand the philosophy of both groups relatively well and can tell you that requests for new item types and fields are treated very conservatively. Any changes will impact all users of Zotero and major changes required specifically for genealogists and no one else are very unlikely to be implemented.
For my own purpose, I've written the templates that I use personally.
You wrote, "There are hundreds of citation styles already ..."
Very aware there are many. The devil is in the details, as genealogy has a need for the details. As I said before, it's our objective to support the Evidence Explained process.
by that you mean csl styles? Would it make sense to share those? I'm happy to upload anything that may be of use to a broader circle of users to the repository.
Reviewing the Types and Fields, from a historical perspective, I have some question about fields, but more about "item types."
I find the item type Artwork, but not Artifacts (Mills has a chapter, "Archives & Artifacts"). Within Artwork, I don't see fields for creator and provenance/accession. I don't see item types for government records, much less national vs state/local records, as that concept might extend globally.
My comments are an observations--I'm not being critical.
FamilySearch.org's worldwide indexing and digitization effort well underway. You can read about the current projects at https://indexing.familysearch.org/projtab/current_projects.jsf
Projects that have been completed are at https://familysearch.org/ [for the global regions under "Browse by Location"].
Footnote.com (now owned by Ancestry, as I recall), carries a banner on it's website, "Many documents never seen before on the Web made possible by our unique partnership with The National Archives."
Likely preaching to the choir, as these various records and record groups become readily accessible (to your computer screen, courtesy of ...), so does the need to each precisely and make distinctions between them. What is available from one archive today may be available somewhere else tomorrow (or even many different places, and in different forms, even as different "collections"). Maybe a related record group becomes available, too.
Maybe you have perspective on why Zotero hasn't item types more specific to historical records. --GJ
not much time, but broadly speaking because item types are conceptual containers that are generic by design. There is no need to distinguish different types of resources using item types - tags, collections, or different content of fields can do that. The key criterium for item types is that the information associated with them is structured in similar ways.
For example, using the report item type and its fields it's possible to cover most official government documents regardless of the level of government (I use that type for documents from the German national parliament as well as local Argentine bureaucracies to give you a sense of the spread) - what changes is what you put into the different fields. Some unofficial government documents may better be classified as manuscript (e.g. the draft of a speech) or even as letters (e.g. a memo from one person to another). In all of these cases the details are determined by field content and categorization can happen with tags and/or collections depending on taste and needs.
I know less about artifacts - academic historians actually rarely cite artifacts (they use them and they often include pictures of them, but don't tend to include them in bibliographies) - afaik not even archaeologists do.
Artwork is one of the item types where we are considering changes, so you could have some input there (see the thread pinned to the top of the forum).
To summarize, the key question for Zotero item types is what an item is bibliographically, _not_ how it is best categorized as a piece of evidence.
In April, you wrote, "... here's a complete list of all items and their fields with the respective mappings to csl
http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/csl-fields/index.html
Is there a more up to date list of item types?
In the referenced list, for example, there is no item type, "document."
There have been no changes since those pages were prepared.
There is no "document" type in CSL, so in a style it is effectively the same as having none at all. In Zotero the fields of "Document" are available on all of the other types, so you can look up the label mappings in any other type listed in those pages.
For the sake of completeness, it would be nice to have a listing for Zotero's document type-- that guide is the only field list regularly available (although similar data can be requested from the server API).
(1) I'm surprised there isn't a field for "documentType." (I'm working on common genealogical "documents." Several major groups come to mind, ala, census, vital records, land/deed, burial, church/parish, manifests, passports. Genealogy researchers might commonly find those to be primary groups, with designated subgroups. Can we expect some field identifying document type to come? If not, perhaps you know of some examples I might look at to see how others handle the missing identifier.
(2) The big bold notice on each of the Zotero metadata item type pages, seems to caution about lack of available event location field. I'm still thinking through the implications of NB's note, but know genealogists tend to be precise about recording event dates and locations separately from what might be publication data. I assume there might be a forum topic where this was discussed in more detail.
"NB: Zotero maps the "place" field to both "event-place" and "publisher-place", in all item types. When a value is present for the Zotero field, both CSL fields are always available. It is therefore impossible to know, without knowledge of the "virtual" item type used in Zotero, and possibly the user interface label as well, which value is intended.
Ideally, the field assignments between a calling application and CSL should be either many-to-one or one-to-one and not, as in this case, one-to-many."
1) Many item types - report and manuscript among them, have a "Type" field that is intended for document type. Generally I'm in favor of including that field in more item types. You can help that by providing specific suggestions including use cases (in the pinned thread at the top of the forum).
2) Well, currently Zotero doesn't allow two dates or two locations for any item type. We'll have an original date of publication - the most common request - pretty soon. Everything else really requires more explanation on your part - you can search the forum for threads on that and then, again, request changes to the schema that are necessary for citation purposes.
The note refers to something more technical and less relevant, namely the fact that when the a Zotero item has a "place" - it can be called using both variables - that's really unfortunate for style development, because otherwise it would be possible, e.g., to test for the presence of an "event-place" to see if an item is an event, it would be possible to print the location for published items, but not events etc.
But event place should be on its way for more types-- and for unpublished things (manuscript), the one date that exists would likely be considered to be event-place.
(1) ... that both report and manuscript have a type field has not gone unnoticed. I'll input.
(2) ... I'm aso thinking at the catalog or archive level. If someone is going to catalog and digitize death certificates, take the Missouri collection accessible online from the Missouri Sec. of State, they'd no doubt identify each of the certificates with more detail than the collection title. That will often include a location detail and a date of death. Ditto deeds, land records (deeds) often have a recorded date that can be several years different than the execution date (and both dates are part of the record identification); early vital records, likewise, often have two key dates, say date of death and date that death was recorded. Said another way, as you know, records are not always developed/archived at the event location or by the event date. Death at sea is an interesting scenario; and records of "First Church" might have been published at Boston, Mass., though the church might be in another state.
No, there is not principled reason. Those pages were generated automatically from the source code of Zotero and CSL, and I just didn't get around to writing code to parse out the author types.
I have looked at the web page with the Zotero fields - cf posting by adamsmith of April 11 above.
Given that Zotero relies on a CSL "engine" for citation rendering, what happens to the Zotero fields that have no equivalent in CSL? Are these fields used for other purposes than citations?
not really, no - you can use them for organizational purposes in Zotero, but that's really it - it's a result of Zotero and CSL being separate projects that coordinate, but started out in different places.
The next major release of Zotero will likely include a major increase of mapping between Zotero fields and csl variables, but there will continue to be unmapped Zotero fields.
you can find a discussion of planned and suggested changes in the pinned thread at the top of the forum as well as an issue tracker here:
https://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/issues
Upgrade Storage
You wrote, "and looking at these examples they might not be 100% possible, but starting with Chicago Manual of style it would likely be possible to get pretty close."
I'm hopeful our team will make good progress. Separately, though, we don't want to redevelop Mills work. While it's far from the only reason, in addition to the TMG and RootsMagic genealogical software applications Steve mentioned, Legacy Family Tree and both Family Tree Maker and Family Tree Maker for Mac support the Evidence Explained styles.
We want to bring more consistency to the labels Mills used, and strike a balance in how we might approach reducing the sheer volume of labels. For example, maybe we don't generally need "author" distinguished from "blog author," but we might want the element "Bible ID (original owner and inclusive dates)."
As above, I hope our team makes good progress and strikes a balance that will work for Zotero as well. --GJ
If that's not the case for what genealogists want, then Zotero is likely the wrong tool for the field.
I'm pointing this out to prevent people from developing wrong expectation. While the Zotero team is certainly willing to adapt the tool to scholars' needs, there are limits. If, for example, you decide that Zotero needs 5 new item types and 6 new fields to be useful for genealogists, I am relatively certain that that wouldn't happen.
Is there a non-tech presentation of the Zotero item types? Fields?
You wrote, "I am relatively certain that that wouldn't happen..."
As with my earlier comment, I understood it's more than just showing examples of _Evidence Explained_ citations for genealogy.
While the templates in _Evidence Explained_ are somewhat US centric, our group has a global focus. --GJ
http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/csl-fields/index.html
To clarify my prior comments - there are two different issues: A citation style for genealogy can be as ideosyncratic and specific as people want: There are hundreds of citation styles already and, except for writing the style, the costs of having a style specifically designed for genealogy (or, for that matter, a subset of genealogy) are zero. That's where I offered to help.
The second issue are field and item type requests. I can't do anything about those anyway, (I'm neither a Zotero core developer nor on the csl dev team), but I understand the philosophy of both groups relatively well and can tell you that requests for new item types and fields are treated very conservatively. Any changes will impact all users of Zotero and major changes required specifically for genealogists and no one else are very unlikely to be implemented.
For my own purpose, I've written the templates that I use personally.
You wrote, "There are hundreds of citation styles already ..."
Very aware there are many. The devil is in the details, as genealogy has a need for the details. As I said before, it's our objective to support the Evidence Explained process.
Thank you for your time. --GJ
Reviewing the Types and Fields, from a historical perspective, I have some question about fields, but more about "item types."
I find the item type Artwork, but not Artifacts (Mills has a chapter, "Archives & Artifacts"). Within Artwork, I don't see fields for creator and provenance/accession. I don't see item types for government records, much less national vs state/local records, as that concept might extend globally.
My comments are an observations--I'm not being critical.
FamilySearch.org's worldwide indexing and digitization effort well underway. You can read about the current projects at https://indexing.familysearch.org/projtab/current_projects.jsf
Projects that have been completed are at https://familysearch.org/ [for the global regions under "Browse by Location"].
Footnote.com (now owned by Ancestry, as I recall), carries a banner on it's website, "Many documents never seen before on the Web made possible by our unique partnership with The National Archives."
Likely preaching to the choir, as these various records and record groups become readily accessible (to your computer screen, courtesy of ...), so does the need to each precisely and make distinctions between them. What is available from one archive today may be available somewhere else tomorrow (or even many different places, and in different forms, even as different "collections"). Maybe a related record group becomes available, too.
Maybe you have perspective on why Zotero hasn't item types more specific to historical records. --GJ
For example, using the report item type and its fields it's possible to cover most official government documents regardless of the level of government (I use that type for documents from the German national parliament as well as local Argentine bureaucracies to give you a sense of the spread) - what changes is what you put into the different fields. Some unofficial government documents may better be classified as manuscript (e.g. the draft of a speech) or even as letters (e.g. a memo from one person to another). In all of these cases the details are determined by field content and categorization can happen with tags and/or collections depending on taste and needs.
I know less about artifacts - academic historians actually rarely cite artifacts (they use them and they often include pictures of them, but don't tend to include them in bibliographies) - afaik not even archaeologists do.
Artwork is one of the item types where we are considering changes, so you could have some input there (see the thread pinned to the top of the forum).
To summarize, the key question for Zotero item types is what an item is bibliographically, _not_ how it is best categorized as a piece of evidence.
In April, you wrote, "... here's a complete list of all items and their fields with the respective mappings to csl
http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/csl-fields/index.html
Is there a more up to date list of item types?
In the referenced list, for example, there is no item type, "document."
TYIA. --GJ
There is no "document" type in CSL, so in a style it is effectively the same as having none at all. In Zotero the fields of "Document" are available on all of the other types, so you can look up the label mappings in any other type listed in those pages.
TY for your earlier comment.
(1) I'm surprised there isn't a field for "documentType." (I'm working on common genealogical "documents." Several major groups come to mind, ala, census, vital records, land/deed, burial, church/parish, manifests, passports. Genealogy researchers might commonly find those to be primary groups, with designated subgroups. Can we expect some field identifying document type to come? If not, perhaps you know of some examples I might look at to see how others handle the missing identifier.
(2) The big bold notice on each of the Zotero metadata item type pages, seems to caution about lack of available event location field. I'm still thinking through the implications of NB's note, but know genealogists tend to be precise about recording event dates and locations separately from what might be publication data. I assume there might be a forum topic where this was discussed in more detail.
"NB: Zotero maps the "place" field to both "event-place" and "publisher-place", in all item types. When a value is present for the Zotero field, both CSL fields are always available. It is therefore impossible to know, without knowledge of the "virtual" item type used in Zotero, and possibly the user interface label as well, which value is intended.
Ideally, the field assignments between a calling application and CSL should be either many-to-one or one-to-one and not, as in this case, one-to-many."
TYIA-GJ
2) Well, currently Zotero doesn't allow two dates or two locations for any item type. We'll have an original date of publication - the most common request - pretty soon. Everything else really requires more explanation on your part - you can search the forum for threads on that and then, again, request changes to the schema that are necessary for citation purposes.
The note refers to something more technical and less relevant, namely the fact that when the a Zotero item has a "place" - it can be called using both variables - that's really unfortunate for style development, because otherwise it would be possible, e.g., to test for the presence of an "event-place" to see if an item is an event, it would be possible to print the location for published items, but not events etc.
(1) ... that both report and manuscript have a type field has not gone unnoticed. I'll input.
(2) ... I'm aso thinking at the catalog or archive level. If someone is going to catalog and digitize death certificates, take the Missouri collection accessible online from the Missouri Sec. of State, they'd no doubt identify each of the certificates with more detail than the collection title. That will often include a location detail and a date of death. Ditto deeds, land records (deeds) often have a recorded date that can be several years different than the execution date (and both dates are part of the record identification); early vital records, likewise, often have two key dates, say date of death and date that death was recorded. Said another way, as you know, records are not always developed/archived at the event location or by the event date. Death at sea is an interesting scenario; and records of "First Church" might have been published at Boston, Mass., though the church might be in another state.
I'll try to track down a on-topic thread.
TYTY.
http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/csl-fields/index.html
Is there a reason a field "author" is not included in those listed the various item types?
http://bit.ly/nXDjPa
Given that Zotero relies on a CSL "engine" for citation rendering, what happens to the Zotero fields that have no equivalent in CSL? Are these fields used for other purposes than citations?
The next major release of Zotero will likely include a major increase of mapping between Zotero fields and csl variables, but there will continue to be unmapped Zotero fields.
https://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/issues
Is this an active topic?
There's some specific activity (also old) at BetterGedcom
http://bettergedcom.wikispaces.com/file/detail/Zotero+Fields_alpha_97-04v.xls