Chicago Style - Single volume of multi-volume work

[bwiernik]

Got this email this morning:

Dear All,

Apologies for emailing out of the blue. I found your names in the chicago-fullnote-bibliography.csl file, and thought I might email directly about a Chicago style citation question I've been encountering.

In quick summary, it appears to me that the latest Chicago CSL does not accommodate the somewhat uncommon, but not rare, case of citing a single volume from a multivolume work. In this situation, a person is supposed to include the title of the single volume (if the individual volumes have independent titles).

My research indicates that volume-title is an available variable in CSL, which could be invoked from Zotero's "extra" field, were the Chicago .csl file to use it.. Alternatively, I see that the Chicago CSL does already use container-title, but not for multi-volume works. Could either of these options be incorporated?

While I work with XML, I don't have enough know-how of CSL or of Chicago (I'm an MLA guy myself) to suggest this addition directly myself, so I thought I'd see if it's on the radar of the maintainers.

Thanks much for reading.

Best, Dan

@adam3smith @POBrien333

[adam3smith]

Yeah, volume-title is the right variable to use here. It's relatively new, so hasn't made it into many styles yet, but generally on my radar (PRs also welcome).

[bwiernik]

I directed the sender to follow up on this issue as needed

[scholarsgrotto]

Brilliant. This email was from me, thank you very much for looking into it. This kind of citation can be found in the Chicago Manual of Style online at 14.118, "Citing a particular volume in a note" (https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed17/part3/ch14/psec118.html) and probably elsewhere.

There are several posts on the Zotero forum covering this as well, from 2020, 2019, and even as far back as 2012.

[POBrien333]

Would you be able to provide a screenshot from the CMoS manual that shows this? (I don't have access)

edit: Does this look right?

[scholarsgrotto]

I believe you are mostly correct, with the exception that the volume title should be italicized. Here's the relevant portion of CMOS 14.118:

Note, however, that things can get complicated if, for example, the individual volume has a different author or editor from the author/editor of the entire series, per CMOS 14.122:

These examples may be beyond spec at the moment, as I don't see anything like volume-author or volume-editor in the CSL variables list, and I'm not sure if you could do an end-around with existing variables such as collection-editor and container-author.

[denismaier]

These examples may be beyond spec at the moment, as I don't see anything like volume-author or volume-editor in the CSL variables list, and I'm not sure if you could do an end-around with existing variables such as collection-editor and container-author.

Yes, that's tricky. There were discussions about changing the currently flat data model to a hierarchical/structured data model, which would allow for such things. But don't expect anything to happen regarding this in the short term.