Importing genealogy references and scannning generated reports

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mawyn
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Joined: Thu Jul 01, 2021 4:27 pm

Importing genealogy references and scannning generated reports

Post by mawyn »

I plan to use Bookends to generate citations and bibliography for a detailed written report of the results of my family history research. I've been reading the Bookends documentation and have watched the videos. It seems that my intended use scenario for Bookends is somewhat different from the normal way to use it so I could use some help. Let me explain.

Up to now I have kept my bibliography in the genealogy program I'm using, Reunion for Mac. I plan on combining reports generated by Reunion with narrative text based on the notes I keep in Reunion. I will use Scrivener to do a lot of the actual writing and organizing of the work, and then transfer everything to Mellel to be able to do detailed footnotes, indexes, lists and bibliography.

I need the power of Bookends to be able to provide the citations and bibliographies. In doing my initial planning I have come to the realization that I'm going to have to do quite a bit of cleaning up of the bibliographic material I've already recorded in Reunion. Once I've done that I will need to transfer the bibliography from Reunion to Bookends.

That's the first thing I need advice about. I've already done some partially successful transfers into Bookends making use of the GEDCOM tags that Reunion uses to denote its bibliography fields. Does anybody have any suggestions about how I can make this transfer as painless as possible?

The second thing I need help with is as follows: Normally, once the references have been entered into Bookends, the in-text citations are created using Bookends itself. What I would like to do is have the Reunion program generate text reports that already include the in-text citations and then have Bookends scan the text to generate citations and biography.

I can tell Reunion to generate the reports using citations of the form [ReferenceNumber]. Bookends can work with in-text citations of the form {Author, Date, Unique ID}. I believe I can tell Bookends to look for [] instead of {}. If not, I can always write a script to change those characters to what I need.

The success of this approach depends on the answer to two questions:

- Is it possible to assign the value of Reunion's reference number to Bookends' Unique ID when I import the Reunion bibliography into Bookends? Or can I maybe use a different Bookends field to hold the Reunion reference number?

- Does Bookends correctly process in-text citations of the form {Author, Date, Unique ID} if Author and Date are blank, effectively using only Unique ID?

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

Matthew
Jon
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Re: Importing genealogy references and scannning generated reports

Post by Jon »

I can't tell you anything that's specific to Reunion, perhaps other people can help there

In general, if you control the output, you can write a corresponding import filter in Bookends that will parse it. If you can output in a standard tagged file format, like RIS for example, that's even better.

As for scanning, Bookends won't import a unique ID, it assigns those itself, but you can import that to a user field and cite using that. FYI, with a few exception, Bookends just looks to see if the temp cite words match words in a reference. If they all do, it's a match. So if you have ref id's like 134325 (or something else that's unlikely to be in any other field), Bookends will find a reference containing 134325 in the user field.

Since you asked, if you cite with a Bookends unique id (and tell Bookends it is by preceding it with #), Bookends will ignore the author and date (or anything else in the temp cite) and rely on the unique ID. So citing by {wrong name, wrong year, #52342} will still find the reference whose unique ID is 52342.

Jon
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mawyn
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Re: Importing genealogy references and scannning generated reports

Post by mawyn »

Thanks for the information, Jon.

I took a look at the RIS specifications online. Maybe what I can do is write a script to transform the GEDCOM tags to RIS tags. That should be pretty straightforward.

I think I will save the Reunion reference number, as you suggested, in a separate user field. If I mark this field by, say, prefacing the number with "Ref", that should make it match reliably. Then all I need to do is doctor the in-text citations in the generated Reunion reports to look like, for example, {Ref253} and scanning will find the correct reference. Does that sound like I understand the procedure?

Do I need to be careful when I choose the Bookends field to store this reference number in? After looking through the various reference types in Preferences > Refs I'm not sure whether I can just pick any field at random for my purposes. Do I have to find a user field that isn't taken otherwise in all of the reference types? Is it the field label that counts or is it the position in the series of fields? For example, can I relabel User18 to MyRef for the reference type Book but relabel User20 to MyRef for the reference type Letter?

Matthew
Jon
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Re: Importing genealogy references and scannning generated reports

Post by Jon »

No, don't do that. As long as the text in the temp cite matches the text in the Reunion id field it will work.

It should be the same field. Unless you plan to use BibTeX (and citekeys) I'd use User1. If you plan to use citekeys pick another field you'd never use (isbn, maybe). Whatever fits your needs.

Jon
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mawyn
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Re: Importing genealogy references and scannning generated reports

Post by mawyn »

I have 1296 sources that are referred to simply by the numbers. Can I just write {234} for example in my text and Bookends will automatically match it to User1 instead of to a page number? Or can I tell Bookends only to try to match the field User1? If so, could you point me to the place in the documentation that explains how to do that?
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Re: Importing genealogy references and scannning generated reports

Post by Jon »

You can't specify a field. If you just write a number then yes, Bookends will match it if it occurs in any field. Of course during the scan Bookends will alert you can offer a list of references to choose from.

But after import, why not use Global Change -> Change Field to put a prefix in front of the numbers in that field? As you suggested before, Ref234. That should be unambiguous.

Jon
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mawyn
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Re: Importing genealogy references and scannning generated reports

Post by mawyn »

Thanks for your help. I think I now know enough to be able to get going.
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