Newbie needs pointers - Bibliographies

Cricri
I am looking at the docs but a bit overwhelmed, especially as I am doing this for my wife who is the researcher (French Lit). I left a separate post in "Translators" regarding the BNF and French accents and symbols.

My wife needs to be able to access and import notices from the BNF automatically. I know there is no translator for eh BNF as yet. But when I look at the rest of the documentation, I get the impression that Zotero can only be used to create bibliographies of cited works. Is it not possible to create a full bibliography using all the items in a "database" (sorry, not familiar with the terminology yet) regardless of whether all have been cited or not?

Secondly, she required categorisation by multiple keywords in addition to "themes and sub-themes". I am not sure whether I am making this very clear but I guess my question is: how flexible is the filtering of items? Can it be used to data-mine, zero-in on relevant references from a large set? I will keep reading the docs but I would be grateful if you could give me your impressions on Zotero's usability and flexibility as a "database" for want of a better expression.

Thanks a lot for you guidance.

c
  • Jon Rubin
    Well I think I can be the bearer of good news:
    1) You can add as many works to your bibliography as you want. You use the 'Edit bibliography' button on the Zotero toolbar.

    2) Yes, from your description, Zotero can do what she wants. Multiple tags (which could be themes or keywords) can be added to any item. Filtering by more than one tag is also possible.

    3) you don't have to look for a better word than database - it is a database!

    Regards,
    Jon.
  • Cricri
    Jon,

    You're a star, thank you very much. All I need to figure out now is a BNF translator http://catalogue.bnf.fr . I did try and Zotero captures data (with accents and symbols as far as I can tell) but does not seem to recognise all "fields" or categorise them properly. Next task.

    Taanks a gain
  • FHeimburger
    The way around the missing BNF translator is to use world cat, http://www.worldcat.org/ instead - that integrates all the BNF catalogue entries and works with Zotero.
  • Cricri
    Brill, thank you so much for that. Off to try it...
  • Cricri
    OK, probably not the right forum to discuss further (?) but Worldcat seems to display a short notice first and below a longer one (for example with the type of book and short title). When you save from Worldcat, only the short form goes to Zotero. I will try to port the discussion elsewhere if there is a more appropritae forum.

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