Sorry about that. Here is one example:

The material being referenced is an article drawn from the 29 July 1834, Huntsville, AL, Southern Advocate (a weekly newspaper).

In endnote, the entry contains information in the following fields (the parenthesis set off the information I typed into the associated field):
Reference Type (newspaper article)
Reporter (Anonymous-reporter)
Year (1834)
Title (Most unparalleled and bloody affray)
Newspaper (Southern Advocate)
City (Huntsville AL)
Issue Date (29 July 1834)
Keywords (Mobile AL
Alabama
Baldwin County AL
Murder
Slave man
Slaveholders)
Abstract (A dispute between white men over who owned a slave [slaves?] goes very wrong, leaving 'One negro man killed,' and also at least one white man.)
Link to PDF (-with the internal link that I understand Zotero can't yet import-)

After importation in to Zotero, all I have is the following:

Title: Most unparalleled and bloody affray
Author: Anonymous-reporter
Abstract: A dispute ... [as appears in Endnote]
Date: 29 July 1834
Tags: [each of the above keywords appears as a single tab]

As you can see, I lose critical information: in this case the name of the newspaper. In fact, from what appears in the newly imported version, I don't even know that the information comes from a newspaper, never mind which one. Without the link to the PDF, I cannot replicate the missing citation information. Without the missing citation information, I cannot locate the associated PDF.

That's one case.
Here's another, this one a citation to a web-based resource:

Here's what appears in the Endnote version -

Reference Type (Electronic Book)
Author (Jacob D. Green)
Year (1864)
Title (Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky, Containing an Account of His Three Escapes, in 1839, 1836, and 1848)
Publisher (Huddersfield: Printed by Henry Fielding, Pack Horse Yard, 1864)
Date Accessed (29 June 2007)
Type of Medium (HTML)
Keywords(Kentucky
Runaway Slave
Queen Anne's County MD
Maryland
Labor, child
Grapevine Telegraph
Teamster
Baltimore MD
Political dynamics, domestic
Executed
Delaware
Milford DE
County Jail
Slave sale
Auction
Hagerstown MD
Tennessee
Memphis TN
Slave hire
Northern abolitionists
Free people of color
Utica NY
Cleveland OH
Oberlin OH
Zanesville OH
Cincinnati OH
Louisville KY
Buffalo NY
Canada
Maritime workers)

Notes (p. 5: "From eight to eleven years .... [this entry has a lengthy note])
URL (http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/greenjd/greenjd.html)


Here's what appears in the Zotero entry after importing:

Title: (as above)
Author: Green, Jacob D
Publisher: (as above)
Date: 29 June 2007 1864
Extra: (the same text that appears in the Endnote "Notes" field - see above)
Tabs: (for some odd reason, the endnote keywords have been bundled into three different "tags" rather than appearing as individual and separate tags - they would all need to be disentangled to be of any use)

Somewhat different problems attached to this entry than to the newspaper entry. In this one, for instance, I lose the url that would take me to the original document. I lose the reference type information. The date accessed field is somehow superimposed on/melded with the publication year field. Because of kind of information lost, there's nothing to indicate that this material is available electronically, never mind where I should go to find it in order to repair the citation information.

I could offer more examples - with different loses or mistranslations of data, but this should give you some sense of the range of problems I've encountered.

In answer to your question about the other export forms I've used, I've tried BibteX first, and then RIS. Both came up with similar problems.

From what I can figure, my options are limited. 1) Either give up on the Zotero idea altogether. 2) Wait for an upgrade to resolve at least a few of these issues. 3) Embark on a truly tedious cut & paste adventure, moving information from Endnote to Zotero, one field and one entry at a time.

That is, of course, unless you have a better solution????

Thanks, Susan

Here are the BibteX excerpts for my two examples:

@misc{
Author = {Anonymous-reporter},
Title = {Most unparalleled and bloody affray},
Month = {29 July 1834},
Abstract = {A dispute between white men over who owned a slave (or slaves?) goes very wrong, leaving "One negro man killed," and also at least one white man. },
Keywords = {Mobile AL
Alabama
Baldwin County AL
Murder
Slave man
Slaveholders
},
Year = {1834} }


@misc{
Author = {Green, Jacob D.},
Title = {Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky, Containing an Account of His Three Escapes, in 1839, 1846, and 1848},
Publisher = {Huddersfield: Printed by Henry Fielding, Pack Horse Yard, 1864},
Month = {29 June 2007},
Note = {p. 5: "From eight to eleven years of age I was employed as an errand boy, carrying water principally for domestic purposes, for 113 slaves and the family. As I grew older, in the mornings I was employed looking after the cows, and waiting in the house"
p. 8: drives his master to Baltimore
pp. 9-10: describes how he escaped a whipping by laying the deed (and punishment) off on another slave.
p. 16: recounts story of an 11 month old infant sold from its mother's arms.
pp. 20-21: how a slave was burned a the stake for murdering a white man
pp. 23-27 : steals a horse and rides 37 miles to Baltimore, goes on to Delaware (he's headed for Pennsylvania). He makes it to Philadelphia where he finds work in the town of Derby for three years. His employer goes bankrupt, Jacob is thrown out of work, arrested, and sent back to Maryland where he is jailed until his former owner shows up.
pp. 28-30: recounts the slave sale, breaking up of families, etc. In an awful scene, a slave husband kills the master who sold himself and his wife separately, all three end up dead. Jacob is sent off to the Hagerstown jail to await his transfer to Memphis, TN

pp. 31-35:after working in TN for 3 yrs, 7 mths, Jacob's master hired him to a guy headed for New Orleans. Not wanting to go, Jacob headed for the Memphis wharf and with the assistance of two black crew members (steward and cook) stowed away on a steamboat loaded with cotton. He eventually landed in Utica NY, but once again, while out on an errand, ran into his master who apprehended him, handcuffed him, and tossed him in prison. He got away for a time by jumping overboard of the steamboat carring them back South, but was once again caught by someone who knew him. Taken back to KY where he was sold at auction. Spent 12 months as a coachman, saw his chance once again, and drove away toward Louisville and the river. This time Jacob made it to Toronto, Canada via Buffalo NY
},


In looking at this, it appears that I also need to find is a different output format. Many of the losses/distortions were incurred at an early stage in the process. My apologies to Zotero. But being the un-Geek that I am (a state I cannot emphasize enough), I simply follow directions as they're given to me. If there's a different output form that I could try, I would certainly be happy to give it a whirl.

Susan

In looking at this, it appears that I also need to find is a different output format. Many of the losses/distortions were incurred at an early stage in the process.

Yup--the bibtex file generated by endnote already has many of the flaws you cited (far beyond that of typing, which Bruce mentioned). And what about the RIS file?

Endnote's export is far from perfect. It is possible to customize the export filters to fix some (but probably not all) of these issues. The interface to do this is more user friendly than the interface to customize the Zotero import (currently) & you may wish to at least glance at it.

FWIW: I don't know if Zotero wants to be in the business of supplying Endnote filters, but this should be seriously considered. I help develop another bibliographic database & we made an endnote output filter from scratch that just spit out data as well as it could into a tab-separated file for minor massaging and import into our database. Actually making Endnote export something like MODS XML (or Zotero RDF) used to be tremendously difficult (to impossible). I don't know if it has improved.

An alternative would be to eventually come up with an Endnote XML import filter. Endnote XML isn't great, but might be the best we can do for now without making a filter.

Excellent.

Yes, Endnote encourages some bad practices WRT to data entry (custom fields and such among them) that sometimes make it difficult to get that data out. I've had the same experience, and also found periodic data-cleaning was both necessarily and valuable.

Sadly this is a limitation of RIS, I do not believe they support a field for call number. "N1" is the notes field in RIS, so it looks like Endnote is dumping call numbers into notes because there is no field for it.

@migugg: Though non-standard, agreeing on a user-definable RIS field for data transfer might work. However, note that 'U1' is used by Bibutils and other tools to indicate the type of thesis, e.g. "Masters thesis" or "Ph.D. thesis".

I changed the RIS import/export style in scaffold, so that it uses U2 as the call nr. field. I can send the respective endnote-style file to zotero, if you want to post it on your webpage. Otherwise, if this is not possible, you can by hand change the endnote style and include the following line:
U2 - `Call Number|`
to any of the Reference Types where you wish that call nr is exported to zotero.