Works or Files Display Journal or Book More Clearly
Hypertext-infused philosophy personal database software
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#6 Works or Files Display Journal or Book More Clearly
When I'm looking at a work I want to know where it was published. For instance when I'm looking at a journal article I want to know what journal it was in. Book chapters display this quite well already, because they have the "Larger Work" section at the top. So maybe if the work is a journal article, that section could instead display the journal. Or alternatively perhaps the "Main Files" tab could have another column, "Journal," which lists the journal (and volume and issue and pages, perhaps - why not?). There are probably other ways to display this (better perhaps than my suggestions) but the basic thought is that it would be nice to be able to see this.
If something has been published in multiple books (i.e. multiple larger works) then presumably I can't see this either. I don't think I would care about seeing this, but perhaps someone might care.
In general it wouldn't hurt and it would be nice to basically just see a list of everywhere a work has been published (as far as Hypernomicon knows, I mean) when I'm viewing a work. So for instance it would be nice to see that Morreal's "The Justifiability of Violent Civil Disobedience" was first published in 1976 in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and later reprinted in Civil Disobedience in Focus.
I agree that the Larger Work field should switch to Journal (or Publication) when the work type is Paper.
I also agree that secondary Larger Works should be displayed somewhere, and that the most obvious place is in a tab alongside Main Files, Sub-works etc. I don't think it should be in the Main Files tab itself, because that would presumably require you to have one file per larger publication. You should be able to see a list of the different larger publications to which a work belongs, without possessing files corresponding to each.
Maybe the best thing to do here is for the right side of the works tab to be more like the right side of the Bibliography Manager. It would be a report view, showing authors, tags, as well as the other bibliographic information (journal, etc.) if present. There would be an edit button or you could double click it or something like that. Then it would change to how it normally is now. This is similar to how there is a view-only mode and an edit mode for the main description fields on each tab. That would prevent all the wasted space when there aren't very many authors or tags (which is almost all the time if your database is like mine).