Thanks. That's a huge shame. It was looking good until then!

I've just discovered that OpenOffice itself is developing a Bibliographic facility (which really makes more sense, for my needs, than a Firefox add-on, however useful it is!); I need to find out more about that.

Thanks again.

Thanks, Jon. What is really good about forums like these is getting real advice from real people who have been in similar situations! I shall avoid OpenOffice Bibliographic for the next year or three (by which time the thesis will be done -- fingers crossed).

I'll definitely look further into Zotero -- but I've also been advised to check out Bibus, which like Zotero (but unlike EndNote) is free, and works with OpenOffice -- and apparently does have a way of recognising and incorporating existing EndNote refs and bibliography. So it's probably one or the other.

There is a future, and I shall get there somehow...

Thanks to all of you for your help and advice.

I downloaded Zotero yesterday, discovered how absurdly easy it is to grab bibliographic info from e.g. amazon, then followed the instructions to import my old EndNote bibliography. No hassles, and new entries merged seamlessly into the existing bibliography. And it is so straightforward to use! I've integrated it with OpenOffice -- again, no hassles -- and have done a few trial runs of inserting citations -- again, very easy.

Compared to the admittedly old version of EndNote I used a few years ago, this is bliss.

The next task is to go through the 30,000 words of my three completed chapters and change all the old in-text citations to Zotero citations. I've done a few, and it's easy enough to do, but as there are nearly a hundred pages with often four or five to a page, it's going to take a while. I don't suppose there's any way of speeding it up...?

I can see this is a forum I shall be spending some time on -- the friendliness, helpfulness and quality of comment is way above standard!

Thanks for the Copac link. I've been a member of the British Library for a couple of years, for more obscure research, but I don't know how I managed not to know about Copac -- clearly an invaluable resource. (I only used Amazon because I happened to have that open in a tab when I first downloaded Zotero, so it was convenient to see how automatic input worked.) Also with Copac, unlike some other online academic resources (JSTOR, for example), you don't have to jump through all sorts of membership hoops to use it. Excellent.

As for changing the in-text citations, it looks like one of those jobs to drop into for an odd hour from time to time...

Two points I would like to make here.

I have just imported ~10,000 references from Endnote to Zotero and I have only found a perceptible lag when opening the main collection for the first time (in firefox)-- this takes ~4 seconds compared to 2 seconds in Endnote. For the added functionality I can live with the loss of about 4 hours in a year; hey, I lost more time importing citations into Endnote via. Import Files which I now can do in Zotero with a click of the button.

The second point is that I have always considered it dangerous to use any database - e.g. Zotero, Oracle, MySQL, Zotero, Endnote - to store pdf files. Files in files create problems. People should store the pdf files in a structured directory system and insert the appropriate URL to this file into the URL field in Zotero. That way if you ever loose your Zotero Database you don't actually loose you reference collection.

Personally, I have not gone totally paperless. I print the papers I am interested in and store them in a sequential library. The location and index number for each book, reference or map is recorded in my Zotero Database. If I want to reread or check a quote I pull the reference from the library using the codes stored in Zotero.

Good points. As I said I don't store my PDFs electronically, so some of these nuances have evaded me so far. It is good to know that Zotero does not store the PDFs in its database but rather a distinct directory.