Sonny Software

Hi, rather than reviving an old thread (here http://www.sonnysoftware.com/phpBB3/vie ... 158&p=5523), I thought I'd start a new one to lodge another vote for Bookends importing from the Zotero library with attachments (esp. PDFs) included.

I'm a grad student currently evaluating bibliography managers for use with my dissertation, and would like to know if there's any chance Bookends will ever be able to do this.

Compared to any other bibliography manager, Zotero currently seems the best at automatically downloading and storing reference information and full text PDFs, as well as a snapshot of the webpage if a PDF is not available, from the most number of online catalogs. All this from your browser window. (See a partial list of catalogs here http://www.zotero.org/translators/). The list is constantly growing, and any changes in a website that break the existing translators are quickly caught and the translator fixed to work again. So although it apparently can scrape more data than Reference Miner does (and with fewer steps for attaching files or taking a snapshot of the webpage), Zotero doesn't have the flexibility and customizability of dedicated reference mangers like Endnote or Bookends, and feels a bit cramped running only in a browser window.

For this reason, I'd like to use Zotero as a 'frontend' to my workflow, as a tool for gathering reference information online, while using a program built to handle a large database with many groups and finer control over bibliography styles and formatting, like Endnote or Bookends. I have recently downloaded trial versions of both of these programs, and will likely end up buying whichever first offers the ability to correctly import the Zotero database along with all its attachments.

The only export format Zotero currently offers that includes attachments is in RDF format (Resource Description Framework, an open standard for XML metadata). However, something not mentioned in the previous thread was the possibility of directly reading from Zotero's SQLite database? Have no idea if this is even possible let alone easier, but there is some info on it on Zotero's developer page (here http://dev.zotero.org/).

Thanks for any info you can provide.

Hi,

Thanks for the post and the information. A few points that may be of interest:

1. You mentioned Reference Miner. That's a lightweight version of the Online Search built into Bookends. Many if not most of the sites supported by Zotero via the browser plugin can be searched directly by Bookends (via the Z39.50 protocol). Bookends also has support for dedicated searches of Web of Science, JSTOR, and arXiv. Importing of pdfs (or web pages) of compatible sites is automatic, and can be done at any Web site by drag and drop.

2. The next update to Bookends will be released soon, and Online Search will have new capabilities to detect certain kinds of embedded reference information (and Bookends will be able to output this as well). Please take a look at our "what's new" page when it's released: http://www.sonnysoftware.com/newfeatures.html

As for better information interchange with Zotero, that's a good idea and something we'll be taking a closer look at.

Jon
Sonny Software

hi Jon,

Thanks for your quick response, which certainly inspires a lot of confidence in Bookends. Good to know that you're working on more online search capabilities in Bookends. I had assumed Reference Miner included all the existing online search abilities of Bookends, but hadn't looked at it closely.

Will be curious to see what sites the new version of Bookends will handle. I'm in the humanities, and regularly use the following: Ingenta, Proquest, EBSCOHost Academic Search, Wilson Art, Grove Art Online, JSTOR, Project Muse, Expanded Academic ASAP (Gale), MIT Press Journals, as well as WorldCat/Firstsearch.

I suspect Zotero will continue to be able to search the most number of catalogs, as well as reference works & major newspapers; and it has one-click downloading of reference info plus any attached pdfs, or alternately a screenshot of the web page. Hence rather than try to duplicate its capability, I'd like to have a reference manager that will let it do the searching/scraping/downloading. Thanks again.

I have to support sdedalus request, as zotero has really some powerful and easy-to-use / one-click capabilities that are so useful when searching in the online catalogues. But for the more sophisticated citing and bibliographing business I actually prefer using bookends (though I need much more training on how to correctly format things and so on).

If you could import the zotero findings easily into bookends that would provide such an improvement for (at least) my workflow, as I wouldn't have to type them in manually or online search them again through bookends (that's all redundant work)


Is there a way to import it already (without attachment?) that I've missed so far?

Hi,

You can easily transfer references (without attachments) from Zotero to Bookends. Export from Zotero (as RIS or BibTeX -- I'd suggest RIS) and import that into Bookends using the corresponding Bookends import filter).

BTW, with regard to attachments, Zotero saves each particular element of a web page as a separate file, as opposed to a single web archive, so if/when Bookends does support import of Zotero attachments only pdfs would work.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thank you for your reply. It does work with RIS but unfortunately it messes up the umlaut and special characters

Hi,

Send me the RIS file you're trying to import. My guess is it's encoded as UTF-8 and you're not telling Bookends about it (File -> Import Text Encoding is where you'd do this).

Jon
Sonny Software