Export to filemaker?

moswell
Has anyone tried to export their Zotero collection to Filemaker Pro? Here's why I ask: I'm a librarian, and I've got a little order card database where I keep books I'm planning on ordering. The database is nice because I have it formatted so it prints out the order cards I need instead of having to write them out by hand. What I'd like to do is create a collection of books in Zotero and then export them to my database so that the fields populate automatically. The problem right now seems to be that Zotero is a flat file (? - am I right about this?), so there are no distinct fields to map onto my existing database.

Any suggestions or tips?

Thanks!
  • noksagt
    People have asked about going the other way (FMP -> Zotero) & the answer is similar.

    Citation metadata in Zotero is stored in a SQLite database, not a flat file. The problem in writing a converter from/to FMP (or any other database) is that there is more than one way to represent the data. Did you create the FMP schema yourself? Perhaps you can write (or hire someone to write) a translator from one of the common bibliographic formats to a FMP import format?
  • Matthias
    In addition to noksagt's recommendations, you could also try to export Zotero data from the SQLite database as tab-delimited text (using one of the available SQLite tools), then use Filemaker's field-mapping tools upon import to push the data into the correct fields.Filemaker remembers the last mapping so it should be rather straight forward to perform this task repeatedly.
  • moswell
    edited May 14, 2007
    Thanks folks for the quick comments! After writing out this post my thoughts on the subject were a little clearer. I signed up for a free Endnote web account, exported Zotero to that, and then exported from Endnote as tab-delimited. Then I was able to map out the fields in FMP.

    @matthias - maybe I'll look into an SQLite tool for export as tab-delimited to save myself the Endnote step.

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