4 replies to this topic

[strathglass]

Why would the Date value for a source of type "Obituary/Newspaper item" be a source detail and not a master source data item?

This makes no sense to me, and before I go "fixing" this with my own custom template, I'd like to know if there is some rationale for this.

I want to use the Date as the date of the newspaper that carried the obituary.

[strathglass]

It's a bit worse: the Footnote Template does not have angle brackets where you might expect them; here is the format:

[ItemID], <i>[Newspaper]</i>< /[[TranslatedName]/]>, [PubPlace], [Date]<, [Details]><. [Annotation]>.

 

So my use of this template generated a literal footnote as follows:

1. [ItemID], Toronto Star, Toronto, Ontario, 29 September 2008, [Details]. [Annotation].

 

Seems like a big mistake for the standard template to not use angle brackets around ItemID.

Also, although there are angle brackets around Details and Annotation. they still showed up in the actual footnote as noted above - why??

 

EDIT: When I modified (a copy of) the source template to add angle brackets around "[ItemID]", the report generated after that no longer included "[Details]" nor "[Annotation]". Strange.

[TomH]

Q1: the designer of the template chose to lump all editions of a given newspaper under one Master Source. He's a lumper. A splitter may prefer to have each edition cited as a master source. An extreme splitter would have a unique master source for each obituary, birth, article cited from the newspaper, having no fields in the source details. It's a matter of choice. Jerry Bryan here is the chief advocate for extreme splitting. Search his posts for more...

[Jerry Bryan]

If you don't like one of RM's built-in templates, you can't change it directly but you can copy it and change the copy. Copying a built-in template and changing the copy might be a lot easier than designing your own template from scratch.

For your application, you might need only to mark/unmark specific fields to make them into Master Source fields or Source Details fields to meet your needs. But you might also need to change the sentence template a little to handle the angle brackets problem.

 

A good aspect of RM's design of source templates is that the sentence template itself works exactly the same for Master Source fields and for Source Details fields. If the only thing you look at is the sentence, you can't tell which fields are which. That in turn means that if you copy one of RM's templates the only thing you might have to do is to click check boxes to make fields into Master Source fields and Source Details fields in a way that meets your needs.

 

Jerry

[strathglass]

Q1: the designer of the template chose to lump all editions of a given newspaper under one Master Source. He's a lumper...

 

OK, so maybe then it's just a preference thing - thanks for pointing that out.