importing a folder w subfolders of .ris-files

kkrabat

I maintain a list of poet debut books. I used to get the weekly list of all publications in Denmark as a PDF from the national registration organisation DBC - and I could search that PDF in the browser, easily find, easily copy entry as comma separated text, and use As Such almost without alterations.

Today I got the sad news that this PDF is no longer being published, but that "all the data is accessible via search function" from the Danish library system's database bibliotek.dk. These search results come as public audience friendly, wordpress clunky, line by line informational, yadayadayada, you get the picture.

Following my search I can download all results one post at a time... as .ris-format, or for RefWorks and EndNoteWeb. I chose .rif, as I had Zotero already. All in all btw. 5-600 posts... With an incredible amount of noise, as I have no need of a database - I just need the data from cells containing data.

I can import .ris-files One At A Time into Zotero...

For the Newbie, please:

- how do I import the whole shebang into Zotero all at once?

example
DBC
ugefortegnelser
week 18
a.rif
b.rif
c.rif
week 19
a.rif
b.rif

- how do I export the whole shebang into something line based and sortable? Preferably without the noise of unused cells

example
year author title publisher pages kat. reg.-date notes
2021 k.krabat my poems GOD 212 86-01 21-10-1 "Poems for all ages."

Thank you, you will be today's best friend, if you can point me in the right direction.

(Im on Mac OSX El Capitan on 17" late 2011 MBP, running the latest Zotero.)

kk

AbeJellinek

In response to your first question, the nice thing about RIS is that multiple RIS files can be merged simply by concatenating them together. If you're familiar with the Terminal, you can do the following:


$ cd <drag in the folder containing your RIS files>
$ for f in **/*.ris; do (cat "${f}"; echo) >> _merged.ris; done


That should output one file called _merged.ris that contains the contents of all of the RIS files in one, with a newline added after each one (since it looks like the output produced by bibliotek.dk doesn't have trailing newlines). You can then import that single RIS file.

That said, the browser connector should support bibliotek.dk. I'll work on that.

kkrabat

Thank you for responding so fast.

But Terminal responds with "bad syntax" - its the $, I believe

I would use sudo cd... and sudo for f, but when we get to (cat "$f"...) I don't know what to write instead.

Also, how to export a line based output only with cell containing content?

best, kk

AbeJellinek

Oh no, no, you don't want to use sudo anything here. The $ is the prompt. Don't paste that part. Leave the rest as is.

kkrabat

oh, man, I'm so...

Well, the import worked. Naturally. Sorry about that.

Then, can I export a line based output only with cell containing content?

How does your Chrome plugin work with bibliotek.dk?

dr_kevinC

I have the same sort of issue. I just did a big lit search and have dozens of ris, nbib, bib files (not all publishers support the same bibliography format, and over half time have to look things up in Google Scholar to find a full text PDF. Oh, I have a dozen or two fewer dozens of PDFs as well. And the odd Epub since heaven forbid a publisher offer their precious paper in such plebian a format as a PDF...

Importing a RIS file into a collection and then attaching the PDF is exactly the workflow I am trying to **avoid.*** (all told, citations/PDFs there are about 740 files to process).

I would think that importing a directly full of citations (of disparate format) and having either Zotero (or Calibre--which I would like to use, eventually, as I like the full text search optinos w/o having to deal w/ Xapian/Recoll).

Thanks

adamsmith

Sorry, there appears to be something missing from your post and I can't make out what you actually want to do.
FWIW, you almost certainly would have saved yourself time by using the Zotero browser add-on rather than downloading metadata files.