In the new Word 07, there is no choice for doing an encyclopedia
bibliographic entry. Why is that and what do I do to instruct studentsthat
need to use this source?
Why is that?
Because the Open XML schema for bibliographies only defines 17
different sourcetypes. My guess is that they considered those 17 the
common group. You want 'encyclopedia', I want 'map', my neighbour
wants 'statute', the historian wants 'ancient text', the lawyer wants
'hearing'... You can keep adding types, but there will always be
people who want an extra type. Personally, I think there selection is
too limited, but that's just what we have to work with.
What do I do to instruct students?
Hopefully, you do not force them to use Word for starters. Unless
you are giving a course on Word (where an extra type wouldn't be
important), the content should be way more important than how it was
created. If a student wanted to create it using some LaTeX editor or
OpenOffice or WordPerfect or ... that should be just as good for you.
By the way, if this is part of a homework, it is really bad of you to
assume that all students have access to the latest version of Word. Of
course that doesn't answer your question.
There are a couple of possible answers:
1)You could tell them to use the 'Miscellaenous' type.
2)You could tell them to use the 'Book Section' type. After all,
electronic variants not included, an encyclopedia is nothing more than
one or more books containing hundreds of sections.
3)You could tell them to use an alternative product. There is a free
Zotero Word plugin for bibliographies and there is the (expensive)
EndNote program which can be used in combination with Word. There are
several other tools out there, but those two are probably the most
used ones.
4)You could do the job yourself and create the extra type yourself.
Although not 100% correct (there is an OpenXML schema violation,
unless you would follow a subtype approach), you can perfectly define
your own types (such as encyclopedia). Defining the types is easy,
defining how the input of the types should be formatted by Word is a
lot harder though. If you want to go that way, post a follow-up
message and I'll give you some pointers and possible solutions to the
problems.
Yves
