Sonny Software

There is a little bug in the automatic formatting of citations:

I LOVE that Bookends automatically capitalizes titles as it goes from the reference to the citation. However, there is a convention in many humanities texts of having a catchy quote as part of a title, and the first letter after the quotation mark doesn't get capitalized.

e.g.

Lawrence Gilckman, "'Buy for the Sake of the Slave': Abolitionism and the Origins of American Consumer Activism," American Quarterly 84.. etc.

even though in the Reference window it is properly capitalized, in citatations it scans as

Lawrence Glickman, "'buy For the Sake of the Slave': ... etc"

I know this may be surprising for those not in history/cultural studies, etc, but this happens more than you might think. As far as I can tell, the only way to fix this is to go in manually to the post-scanned document.

Wow, that is strange. Can you refer us to an example of this usage (a journal that uses this style, or an article)? So in your example article, is this the way the article itself is titled?

yup, it might sound sort of cheesy but it's fairly common practice among historians, lit scholars, and others who study primary texts to draw a quote from their research as a title. It's usually in article titles, so you have the added awkwardness of quotes within quotes.

that is an actual example, here are a few more from the same bibliography (as Bookends formats them):

Andor Skotnes, "'buy Where You Can Work': Boycotting for Jobs in African-American Baltimore," Journal of Social History 27, (1994)

Lawrence Glickman, "'make Lisle the Style': The Politics of Fashion in the Japanese Silk Boycott, 1937-1940," Journal of Social History 38, no. 3 (2005)

.. and so on. Open any humanities journal and I'll bet you will see something like this... for example, the most recent issue of the Journal of American History has 2 articles with quotes in their titles:
http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/issues/924.shtml

Bess wrote:However, there is a convention in many humanities texts of having a catchy quote as part of a title, and the first letter after the quotation mark doesn't get capitalized.

I see now. I misread your description of the problem. I thought you were saying the *humanities convention* is that the first letter *doesn't* get capitalized. That's what I thought was odd. But you mean that Bookends should be capitalizing the first letter after the quotation mark. Yes, that would be a problem.

So the problem is that you are using a quote followed by an apotrophe, and Bookends isn't capitalizing the first character after that. Hm, I just tried this and it works here. So we must do doing something a bit differently.

Please contact me directly, and send a single reference (exported from Bookends). Also tell me which format you are using (if it's one of your own making, please send that to me as well).

Thanks.

Jon
Sonny Software

To follow up for anyone interested in this, Bookends does handle the case of the first word in a quoted title properly. The original problem appears to have arisen because of the way the information was entered in the database.

Jon
Sonny Software