I frequently find myself at the campus library looking up references on their computers. I use portable Firefox on my thumb drive with Zotero, but our library network has significant problems with user thumb drives and the IT staff has been unable to resolve them, so that's pretty much useless. Ergo, when I go back home I've been tediously looking up the references all over again in order to create Zotero entries.

However, the library does have the capability to email HTML or text files of marked-up references in MARC, end-note, and refworks formats. So I tell the library computer to email me a reference, and here's an example of what I get in the email if I choose End-note/Refworks:

%A Bowman, James, 1948-
%T Honor : a history
%C New York :
%I Encounter Books,
%7 1st ed.
%8 2006.
%@ 1594031428
%@ 9781594031427
%1 BJ1533.H8 B69 2006
%K Honor.
%O "From the earliest records of human civilization until the dawn of the twentieth
century, and in widely separated cultures throughout the world, the story of honor
was inseparable from the story of mankind.".

Here's a MARC example:

LEADER 00000pam 22005294a 4500
001 63178867
003 OCoLC
005 20060521102102.5
008 060118s2006 nyu b 001 0 eng
010 2006001840
020 1594031428
024 3 9781594031427
040 DLC|cDLC|dBAKER|dC#P|dOrLoB-B
042 pcc
050 00 BJ1533.H8|bB69 2006
082 00 179/.9|222
100 1 Bowman, James,|d1948-
245 10 Honor :|ba history /|cJames Bowman.
250 1st ed.
260 New York :|bEncounter Books,|c2006.
300 381 p. ;|c24 cm.
504 Includes bibliographical references (p. 329-359) and
index.
520 1 "From the earliest records of human civilization until the
dawn of the twentieth century, and in widely separated
cultures throughout the world, the story of honor was
inseparable from the story of mankind. Today, an
acquaintance with the concept of honor is indispensable to
understanding the culture of the Islamic world and its
sense of grievance against the West, where honor has been
disregarded or actively despised for three-quarters of a
century.".

It seems to me that Zotero must have the functionality to parse marked-up text like this--that's essentially what it does when it creates a citation from a library's online record, no? However, when I save the email message with such marked-up entries (as an HTML file or a text file) on my hard disk and then try to import it, Zotero says it doesn't have a site translator and won't proceed.

Apparently End-note and Refworks can import marked-up references from HTML or text files like this (I've never used either, but since the library creates marked-up references for these programs, they must be able to import citations this way). So Zotero should also be able to do it. So how do I go about it? Or does the file have to have some kind of code at the beginning to signal Zotero that it should parse the text and create references? If so, can I just copy that code from somewhere and paste it at the top of such files, so Zotero can import the references?

Thanks,
Mike300