Hi there.
I’m a user of the Linux version of Libre Office - Big love for the project!
I’ve just started to use the very handy built-in Bibliography tool in LO Writer. Nice!
However, I do have a question about how it handles multiple citations from the same book. It is probably easier to explain if I give an example:
I want to quote a piece of text from page 21 in a book by Ann Gravells. So I would usually manually type “[Gravells A. 2012 p.21]” just after the quoted text and then add the full details of the book, author, publisher and location etc in the bibliography section at the end of the essay. I use Harvard style quoting so it would look like:
- “Gravells A. 2012: Ann Gravells, “Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector”, Learning Matters,
London, 2012”
Now lets turn to Libre Office Writer specifically…
When I try to use the built-in Bibliography system, It almost works. I enter the book details in the Bibliography library, I quote the text and it places the book details in square brackets and stamps the Bibliography details in the bibliography section at the end of the document. Ah but there is no, no page-number detail. So I go back to the original quotation, right click on the citation text (in square brackets just after the quotation), and use the pop-up dialogue box to modify the entry to show the page number (page 21 in this case). The bibliography now shows the page number at the end of the document.
- “Gravells A. 2012 p.21: Ann Gravells, “Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector”, Learning Matters,
London, 2012”
If I later in the document quote another piece from the same Ann Gravells book, with the appropriate page reference, it creates a whole new entry in the Bibliography at the end. There is no option to merge the two entries to just show the one book. It appears that the entry of the page number causes the record to be seen as a separate thing.
This is a problem because I have to quote page numbers but must not duplicate the source information in the bibliography. What I really want is a system (similar to MS Word) where I can add a page number to the citation but have the book it came from only referenced once in the bibliography.
Sorry this is so long-winded but it was not very easy to accurately describe.
Any thoughts?