As it stands now, I find managing sources to be a bit unwieldy. My sources list is rather long, but I have a bunch of sources that are similar enough to each other that it might make sense to have them together inside a user-defined collapsible/expandable group, similar to how places are handled right now.
I currently have 5 years’ Canadian censuses (incl. 2 years’ Census of the Prairie Provinces, which were done in between the general Canadian censuses), 3 years’ Scotland censuses, 3 newspapers from Canadian city A, 3 from Canadian city B, etc., and these groupings are doubtlessly going to expand as I continue my research. Any one of these groups of records kinda just get in the way when I’m looking for one of the others, so it would be helpful to be able to collapse groups containing them. Since they’re also currently sorted by source title, there are a lot of sources that are in entirely different parts of the list that, to me, would make more sense to be physically near (i.e. the aforementioned group of newspapers from a given city).
Also helpful could be the ability to have sub-categories for more granular organization, if one desires.
I don’t know what your source titles are like. For me, I use Ancestry, Find My Past and Family Search the most. I use the exact same title as they have on their sites. Usually they end in a year range. I then can enter the last 7 character eg 38-1947 in the search bar to find the source when recording the citation. I do not scroll down the list as it is too hard to locate the correct one. Sometimes multiple entries will be found, but that usually means selecting the birth, death or marriage source record.
This means 99% of the time I’m doing a cut and paste.
The details for the source record goes in the Page/Vol field. That is again cut and pasted from the record into GRAMPS. After fixing the data format, I enter a comma and then paste the URL of the record in. I put it in this field and not an attribute because it is included in a gedcom upload whereas an attribute is not.
So, since I’m “searching” to find the high level source title all the time. I don’t see the need for your suggestion, but that is me. FYI I have 260 Source titles and over 17,000 citations.
In one of my projects, I have more than 5000 newspaper sources and growing and when finished have approx. 2400 citations to each newspaper. In addition, I will have a multitude of other sources, maybe as many as 3-400 “groups”.
I do reuse the “Gramps-citations”, but each list I use span 3 double pages, it would be great to be able to sort/organize the newspapers on name and year as a minimum…
As it is now, I stopped using Gramps for multiple reasons as a research tool, and only use it as a storage database for confirmed data.
And yes, this is not lineage-linked familytree research…