Transferring library from Endnote to Zotero

mjaguilera
I recently transferred a library from Endnote to Zotero following these instructions: http://thedigitalresearcher.com/how-to-import-your-endnote-library-into-zotero/. It worked quite smoothly for journal articles and books, but I also have a lot of historical archives in the library that did not transfer over well. Specifically, the information in Endnote for Publisher, Volume, Number of Volumes, and Edition did not transfer to Zotero. Is there any way to ensure that all information gets transferred to avoid inputting missing information one entry at a time?
  • bwiernik
    Can you post an example of the RIS for one of the historical archive items?
  • mjaguilera
    Yes, here is an example:

    TY - GEN
    AU - Hammad to M Schneider
    ET - File Number WHOHQ P 9-445-25
    N1 - IMGP0416
    NV - Folder 3
    PB - WHO Archives
    PY - 1984
    RN - key thinkers--carried out IA historical studies
    T2 - 1 October 1984
    VL - A.1330
    ID - 87
    ER -
  • bwiernik
    If you change TY - GEN to the TY - BOOK I think everything should import correctly. Let me know if something still isn’t right.
  • mjaguilera
    Thank you: your suggestion did work for transferring all the information over from Endnote to Zotero. The next step of turning that entry into a correct archival reference is turning out to be another challenge.

    My goal is to have it formatted in Chicago style as so:

    Hammad to M Schneider. 1 October 1984, File Number WHOHQ P 9-445-25, Box A.1330, Folder 3. WHO Archives.

    The only way I have figured out how to do this this via Zotero is to convert the item type to Letter, and then reorganizing information to fill out these items:

    Author: Hammad to M. Schneider
    Date: 1 October 1984
    Archive: WHO Archives
    Loc. in Archive: File Number WHOHQ P 9-445-25, Box A.1330, Folder 3

    So even though I have all of the information from Endnote now in Zotero, I still have to manually reorganize the Archive and Loc. in Archive categories in order to get the desired full reference in Chicago. Luckily I'm not working with a huge library but I'm still wondering if there is any way to do this reorganization without going through each reference one by one (I don't imagine there is but worth a shot to ask!)

    Thanks again.
  • bwiernik
    Sorry, “letter” isn’t type in the RIS spec, so there isn’t a way to automate that import. And with the way you have the collection, box, and folder in different fields, there isn’t a way to get that automatically entered either.

    On recommendation I would have would be to enter the writer and recipient as separate creator fields (click on “author” to change it to “recipient”).
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