With the new formatting bar, there no longer seems to be the “collection” functionality for creating multi-chapter publications. Am I missing something?
Also, I cannot create a dropdown menu in the Navigation section of my community’s Details page.
A colleague shared with me this response from Gabe S. on your team about Collections:
The way content is organized now is using a combination of Tags, for organizing Pubs, and Pages, which allow you to create Pub Blocks to lay out collections of Pubs. There are lots of ways you can use Tags and Pages, depending on your use case. For example, you could display multiple Blocks on a single page if you wanted to create a library of categorized content. Or you could create a table of contents for a book or journal issue by creating a single Page with a single Block that displays just one Tag. To get started, click Manage in the top right of your community and start playing with Tags and Pages. Section 7 of the walkthrough contains more info.
What impact does this have on the “Cite” feature then? For example, using Collections, this report has a single citation even though it has multiple sections. And does this also mean that an editor of a multi-sectioned (now multi-Pub) essay has to take care to repeatedly add the same contributors to each of the individual publications?
I completely see the benefits of the new system in aggregating Pubs into a journal or book, but it still leaves the problem of how to deal with content that technically falls under a single citation/publication but - for readability - benefits from having some way of breaking it into paginated sections.
Thanks for the feedback! As you can tell, we’re currently thinking through how to solve the problem of doing sane collections, both for multi-article collections like journals and single-article collections like books with chapters. It’s been a surprisingly tough challenge on both technical and philosophical levels, but, as you’ll see below, I think we’ve come up with a pretty good way of managing it that we’ll be introducing in the coming weeks.
We’d love to hear if they’ll address your needs or if you have additional ideas.
We’re planning to address this by adding some citation settings to the Tag object. So, when you create a tag, you’ll be able to specify what type of collection it is (DOI, for example, allows you to specify book, journal, conference proceedings, review, etc.) and add the proper metadata. When people go to cite the collection, it will then format it properly given the setting in the Tag. This will have the added benefit of allowing you to include a Pub in multiple collections – say, a journal issue and a year-end best-of collection, and allow people to cite it from the right collection for their purposes.
We hadn’t thought about this, but it’s a great point, and we’ll take it into account as we build this out. I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to do this at the tag level, since a large percentage of the time you will want different authors on each pub. We have had requests for bulk pub management, and we can certainly implement some tools for adding contributors in bulk there. I think we might also consider a tool that makes it easy to split a long pub into multiple ones, copying contributors and so on.
Right now, we’re also planning to add ordering as an option to the Tag object. So, as an admin you’d be able to see all the Pubs under a given tag and specify an order for them. As a reader, you’ll see next and previous links when you read the Pub. We’ll probably also give admins a few different display options for those links – some that feel more book-like, others that feel more journal-like.
Sorry about that. This is a known issue that we will have a fix for this week.
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The fix for this is now live - thanks for catching it!
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