Sonny Software

Hi,

I've found a source field style that I can't seem to design a proper filter for. The trouble is with volume numbers, they are listed as something like:

..., vol. 27, no. 3, ....

Now I've designed the source filter to get to the end of the previous item, then look for the next number, but then I'm not sure what to do. What I originally tried was putting everything until the next comma in Volume, which gives me "27", and then I tried doing the same with everything until the next comma, thinking I might get "27, no. 3", which isn't great, but at least is fairly easy to change manually to "27(3)", which is what I actually want. Unfortunately what happened is that Bookends added the second set of information to the beginning of the Volume field, and so I ended up with ", no. 327", which is disastrous - I'm currently doing a project which requires me to import 200+ references at a time, and there's no way I could remember whether it should be 27(3) or 7(32) or just 327.

Any thoughts? While I'm at it, I might as well shoot for the moon with this source field. It has one other quirk, which is that sometimes it has the page reference immediately following the volume, then the date, and sometimes it only has the date (god knows why, just to make me angry, I think). So we have:

vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 8-17, November 2003

or just

vol. 27, no. 3, November 2003

Is there any sensible way I can deal with this?

Finally, there's a problem I think I asked about months ago, but perhaps there's a way around it in Bookends 8, so I might as well bring it up again. This same search engine has source fields for journal articles, but not for books (why? to make me angry, of course). Unfortunately it has separate date fields for both, but the rest of the publication information for the journal articles is only in the source fields... Ugh. This creates a slight glitch, because I need to take the data from the "date" field (otherwise all books are read as having no date), but doing this AND taking it from the source field (which I need to do to get any publication info. for the journal articles) gives me a date of "November 2003 2003". Admittedly, I can live with that, it's not a big deal to manually edit it, but if there is a way around it I'd like to know...

Anyways, sorry for the length and technical detail of this post. Hopefully someone has some ideas...

Enkidu wrote:Unfortunately what happened is that Bookends added the second set of information to the beginning of the Volume field, and so I ended up with ", no. 327", which is disastrous

Hm, that's a holdover from before Bookends could discrimitate between volume and issue on import. I'll fix it in 8.0.5 so you'll get something like

"vol. 27 , no. 3"

(You can get rid of the space after 27 if you want by editing the Source importer to go to comma, ignore, then to next comma)

So we have:

vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 8-17, November 2003

or just

vol. 27, no. 3, November 2003

Is there any sensible way I can deal with this?

Other than segregate your references by this variable before importing (or using a text editor to create a Source2 tag for the alternate types), no, I'm afraid not.

Finally, there's a problem I think I asked about months ago, but perhaps there's a way around it in Bookends 8, so I might as well bring it up again. This same search engine has source fields for journal articles, but not for books (why? to make me angry, of course). Unfortunately it has separate date fields for both, but the rest of the publication information for the journal articles is only in the source fields... Ugh. This creates a slight glitch, because I need to take the data from the "date" field (otherwise all books are read as having no date), but doing this AND taking it from the source field (which I need to do to get any publication info. for the journal articles) gives me a date of "November 2003 2003".

Again, if you segregate the books from the journals before import you can deal with it. Note that Bookends imports from the clipboard. So this might not be as difficult to do as you think if you have a file to import (open it, delete the books, and copy/import the rest as journals; then open it again, delete the journals, and do the same as books). Not ideal, but perhaps workable...