Sonny Software

Hi Jon,

What is the best way to enter dates that span multiple years. If, for example, I have a dictionary that was compiled between 1935 and 1970, I have usually entered this simply as 1935-1970 in the date field. When exporting this in Endnote XML 8/9 format, however, I note that this is not preserved. It seems to be split up into two entries: year = 1935 & pub-dates = -1970. Is there anyway to export these as one, viz., 1935-1970?

Kindest regards,
Shayne

Bookends doesn't have a dedicated year and month/date field, so when you export as XML it splits up the year from the rest. You can do one of the following:

1. Global move in Bookends to a custom field, then move that to the date field in the target application.

2. Do a global edit (if possible) in the target appllication to reunite the two years.

3. Export/Import as Refer (or some other format) instead of XML.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks Jon,

I will see what is the most efficient of these options. How many of your fields are not dedicated fields, and given the recent increase in the number of available fields, would there be any point on changing these to dedicated fields? I think I recall a similar comment by Reiner (or somebody else). As I understand it, the need for combined fields was largely due to the initial lack of spare/custom fields. Any thoughts on this?

Kindest regards,
Shayne

Most fields are not dedicated (meaning, they have no specific features tied to them). There is nothing to prevent one from using the Date field for year and assigning another field for Month & Day (in fact, that's what we do for the Newspaper type, assigning the latter to User3). Everything would work as it normally does, except you'd have to include the Month/Day field in the format order if you wanted to output it. Note that having the year and month/day in the same field has some substantial advantages given the many, many sources of reference information Bookends imports from, each of which may format this information differently.

Jon
Sonny Software

now I am somewhat confused... did you actually solve the problem with the year field not allowing for a span of years to be entered?

I also encountered this just yesterday for a source which had a span of years. I entered the span (in this case "1997-2001") into the year field, but in the bibliography only the first year was displayed ("1997").

Could this be rectified our do you think there would be serious drawbacks to this?

Hi ozean,

What you are reporting is a different issue. You have "use year only for date" checked on in the format you are using. Uncheck it and the span of years will be used for output.

Jon
Sonny Software

Ah! Great - now it works as expected. Always a pleasure to post a question here and have it answered swiftly!