Bibliography
The bibliography for the Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project is stored and managed using Zotero. To view the whole bibliography, visit our Zotero collection page. You can search and sort through the records using the search box in the upper-right.
Our Use of Zotero
Following practices described in the Epidoc Guidelines, IIP has been maintaining bibliographic entries in a master bibliography and referring to these from individually encoded inscriptions. We feel that bibliographic data entry and editing must be collaborative, web based, and unambiguous. In an earlier stage of the project, we managed the bibliography with a customized SQL database which provided useful features such as controlled lists of journal abbreviations. When the project upgraded in 2013, we decided to replace the custom bibliographic database with Zotero. Zotero does not require maintenance on our part and has a versatile API which allows us to access citations directly when displaying an inscription in our interface. IIP assigns ID numbers to bibliographic entries, following the form [IIP-000], and uses the ID to reference a citation. Zotero also assigns ID numbers to bibliographic entries. These are automatic and function as database keys but are not part of the citation data. Thus, we store the IIP ID in the Zotero “Loc in Archive” or “Extra” field, on the premise that it is our project catalog number. To enable the Zotero API to retrieve a particular citation, we also save the IIP ID as a Zotero tag for each entry: the Zotero API can only access tags and a restricted number of bibliographic fields. We do not convert our bibliography to TEI in order to integrate it into our inscription files. The formatted citations the Zotero API generates using the Citation Style Language (CSL) an open language used by a variety of citation managers, are sufficient. A more complete explanation of how we use the Zotero API is available here.
We feel that our choice of an external database, (particularly Zotero, which is widely used; allows for collaboration; and can host a re-useable, standalone bibliography of sources for inscriptions) is an efficient means of working with different types of material and applying the tools most appropriate for each. In the future, when the IIP corpus is substantially complete, it would be important to incorporate full bibliographic entries as “<bibl>”s into each encoded inscription for archival purposes.