Originally independent works republished in edited volumes, collected writing and so

CSL Evolution
1

Some style guides (MLA, Chicago) have this requirement: Titles of originally independent works that are now being republished in an anthology (“Collected Writings of …”) should be rendered in italics and not in quotes. There’s been some discussion about this here and here, and there seems to be a consensus that this should be covered somehow.

Biblatex uses an item type bookinbook for these cases. And I agree with @Nick_Bart that a separate item type would be a good solution for this problem. @bwiernik has proposed to use item type book with a container-title here. I am not opposed to this, but if this is going to be the official way, I think there are some requirements and also open questions:

  1. This should be handled consistently across styles. At the moment it does not work out of the box for Chicago or for MLA. For Chicago see my comments here, the MLA csl style uses the absence of container-title as a condition for using italics for the title.
  2. Users should know that this is the preferred way to handle such items.
  3. What happens with other fields in these cases? (For example editor: Is this the editor of the container or of the contained item? As I’ve proposed here we should probably add distinct roles for volumes and containers like volume-editor, container-editor to make things clearer here.)

I guess, we’d have to seriously play this through. I am afraid using the existence of a container-title as a condition for title formatting could lead to an even higher level of complexity in already complex styles like Chicago, and it might well be that a new item type could be a simpler solution.

2

I’d like to bring this up again.
Should we go with @bwiernik’s proposal to use item type book for these cases and just use container-title?

And, if we do: How can we address the remaining open questions outlined above?

3

I am in favor of updating the major styles that would need this to be accommodated (e.g., MLA, Chicago), combined with a test case illustrating expected data structure for such an item.

For creators, CSL currently relies on the heuristic that editor and translator refer to the editor/translator of a container if one exists. The cases where this is a problem are fairly rare, rare enough that I’m not sure they are worth pursuing unless a hierarchical data model is adopted. I would expect the same heuristic to apply here: the editor of a book with a container-title is the editor of the container. The editorial-director variable is also available (it’s used in primarily French styles to distinguish the person coordinating the curation of the book contents from persons doing textual editing).

1 Like