Upgrade StorageMigrating from Bookends to Zotero
Greetings!
It was a good while back that I first started fiddling with Zotero and using it as little more than a Web scrapbook, and some time shortly thereafter (perhaps 18 months back) that I went through the process of migrating to it as a serious reference manager. Been quite happy with it, both in terms of its innovations and in pedestrian ways.
I migrated from the MacOS X reference manager Bookends, and while I've seen some conversation in the forums about that combination, switching over took a lot of thought and sorting through things. That was a while back, but I note that the version 10 upgrade of Bookends has if anything complicated the process. In the spirit of serial reciprocity, I've taken a bit of my summer to collect the pieces I used and insights into the migration process, and (since they're longer than a simple forum post) I've made them available here.
To the Zotero developers: let me know if there's anything misleading about this or that you'd prefer to see reworded...my intention is not to muddy the waters!
P.S. To those I was able to meet at GMU in April, thanks for a good visit!
It was a good while back that I first started fiddling with Zotero and using it as little more than a Web scrapbook, and some time shortly thereafter (perhaps 18 months back) that I went through the process of migrating to it as a serious reference manager. Been quite happy with it, both in terms of its innovations and in pedestrian ways.
I migrated from the MacOS X reference manager Bookends, and while I've seen some conversation in the forums about that combination, switching over took a lot of thought and sorting through things. That was a while back, but I note that the version 10 upgrade of Bookends has if anything complicated the process. In the spirit of serial reciprocity, I've taken a bit of my summer to collect the pieces I used and insights into the migration process, and (since they're longer than a simple forum post) I've made them available here.
To the Zotero developers: let me know if there's anything misleading about this or that you'd prefer to see reworded...my intention is not to muddy the waters!
P.S. To those I was able to meet at GMU in April, thanks for a good visit!
I'm struggling at the moment with the same task - unfortunately your website is down since a couple if days. Will it be up soon?
Or could you email me your insights?
Would be a great help for me!
Thanks,
Felix
However, to be honest, I regard this as an exercise in futility for anyone with a large database. I spent many (many) hours converting my BE database, and when I finally got it all into Zotero, the system screeched to a halt. The program was so slow as to be unusable. Zotero simply can't handle databases that number into the thousands (mine had over 6000 entries). Sync certainly won't work (http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/8413/syncing-large-collections/).
For now, I have a small Zotero database at work that I use primarily for its ease of capturing data. Every now and then I import the latest entries into EndNote (provided free by my employer), so I have a complete database somewhere (EndNote has no problem with large databases, and it was a breeze to export the BE database into it). BE has gone by the wayside for now.