Hi Chris,

Thanks for being an avid user of the Center for History and New Media's tools! Scribe is indeed a terrific program and we are working closely with Elena (who is our friend and colleague) to make sure that its users have a smooth migration path to Zotero (if they want to migrate). The Zotero team definitely wants to make sure that Scribe import into Zotero retains as much information as possible; some of this is a little rocky right now simply because of the complexity of the import and also because Zotero doesn't have a few things like rich text notes (we do plan to have rich-text capabilities for notes, although how exactly to implement this has been the subject of some debate elsewhere on these forums).

Scribe 3.3, now available for the Mac with the Windows version due in a few days, includes Scribe->Zotero import (Elena and Dan Stillman are still working to make sure this works flawlessly). Thanks to Elena for working so hard on this upgrade.

We currently have no plan for author's cards per se but it seems like this could happen if authors become item types; some other functionality in Scribe, such as the ability to cite letters in books and history-specific archival material, will become possible in Zotero when we move to the planned (and more advanced) hierarchical item type model.

This is a good new! Looking forward to it!

I'm considering migrating my Scribe data to Zotero, but I'm worried about whether this is a good idea right now. How labor intensive and time-consuming is this?

I'm particularly concerned about the Scribe card types NOT included in the list (in the Scribe 3.4 tutorial) of those should export and import "well." If I Find All my Scribe cards and export as RDF, the card types that don't export "well" will be exported too, right? Is data lost? What happens when I import them into Zotero?

The two big issues in migrating obviously are: 1. I don't want to lose any data; and 2. I want to avoid as much as possible retyping any information. Any advice or suggestions? If I would be opening a Pandora's box by undertaking this migration now (with the current versions of Scribe and Zotero), I'd probably rather wait and do it later.

David

I hope you continue to support both Scribe and Zotero. I'm from the old Unix/Software Tools school: it's best to have different tools each of which does one thing well than to have a Swiss army knife that does lots of things, none particularly well.

Just on the surface, why should one have to open their browser just to enter notes about a book they are reading? Scribe is good for notes and organizing thoughts. Zotero, for entering citation information for online sources. (However, I still find myself manually entering info into Zotero probably 95% of the time.) Neither is particularly good at searching online library databases such as MELVYL, at importing citations from electronic abstracting or indexing services such as EBSCO or ISI, for printing out bibliographies or writing paper using any of the zillions of academic formats, or for customizing for personal use. (E.g., I have my own EndNote style for library research which puts the call number on the left, then the library where it's located, then the author, and then the title.)

Suppose one is taking notes on a a hard-copy journal article. Most of the things one wants to do is to quote, take notes, cross reference, and enter ideas. Zotero, which is oriented to web citations does not do this easily. For instance, notes are in one window and keywords, another. Cross referencing items with matching keywords while taking notes is very difficult.

Also, Zotero has screen real estate issues that note-taking software need not have. Again, suppose one is reading a hard copy and comes across some references. If they're online, one can look them up online and import or (more often) copy the information into Zotero. However, the notes themselves only need a link to the online page, without all that real estate being taken up for library and reference information. It's hard enough to read an online article with Zotero open, because it takes up the bottom part of the screen. If the item is on one's bookshelf, then the reference may already be in the user's bibliographic database, (with EndNote) one can import it from an online database, or one can enter it by hand. Once that's done, one only needs to use the note-taking application. Even if the material is online, it's much better to switch between another maximized window to take notes or to tile the browser and the notes applications.

Both Scribe and Zotero need a Find Duplicates function, and a way of synchronizing (not importing/exporting) with each other and with popular bibliographic database programs. Until they have all the bells and whistles of the better bibliographic software, and maybe beyond, people will continue using their current bibliographic software.

I'd like to see four separate tools, perhaps as front ends to a common database: bibliography/citation database (ala EndNote, etc.), a note-taking/cross-referencing application, a web citation capture and sharing application, and an outlining/paper writing application. I'd also like to see standardized interfaces between them so that people can choose their favorite implementation of each of the four application types and so other application types (e.g., mind-mappers, author's helpers) can easily link up with the others.

marsh--

Zotero already provides capability for cross-referencing and taking notes, and many features that are missing right now (such as notes formatting or sorting of child notes independently from sources) will be added eventually. It's true, certain features (outlines, timelines) might be better added as separate utilities for Zotero. But as far as notetaking/cross-referencing is concerned, it doesn't make much sense to use two programs (Zotero and Scribe) for managing the same type of information.

(By the way, in Zotero you can open a note in a separate window if you want to use more screen real estate to enter text.)

You can drag the note over a tag to add it. There are also two lines at the bottom of the note ("related: [click here]" and "tags: [click here]")--click on them to add related items and tags.

In the dev version you can then search by tag and find notes only--the parent items will come up greyed out if they don't have the tag. i'm not sure if you can do that in the public version.

Export to Zotero from Scribe 3.4 throws an error on import if you have empty or incorrectly formatted records (for example, if you have any file cards with no files attached). This bug is fixed in 3.5, now available for Mac at http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/scribe/ The 3.5 version will be available for Windows this afternoon. Just download the new version, import your records from a previous version of Scribe, and try exporting again. If you use Windows, try to download the new version late this afternoon--make sure to check that it's 3.5 and not 3.4.

Zotero doesn't have to be empty to import records from Scribe.

Non-English characters shouldn't be a problem. Your file may be malformed (although it's unlikely given that you're able to export part of it) or some of your records may contain control characters that are not allowed in XML (you can verify this by running your export file through an XML debugger such as Oxygen). If you've gone through all options suggested on the Scribe to Zotero Transition page and still can't import, please email your file (or a link to it if it's too big) to elena.razlogova@gmail.com and I'll troubleshoot it.

What were the problematic characters? You can probably run search and replace to delete them.

Elena,
Trevor Owens suggested I write to you. I'm working on a biography, with the usual scholarly documentation. I told him that I don't see the advantage of switching from Scribe to Zotero, because I would be adding a level of complexity by migrating, unless Z offers me the same features and functionality as Scribe (or additional functionality), in which case why keep Scribe at all? No doubt, I'm overlooking something that should be obvious to me.

Thank you,
Jeff

Hi, Elana,

I recently upgraded from Scribe 3.2 to Scribe 3.5 in order to then transfer all my stuff to Zotero. (I have close to 3,000 cards.) The upgrade to Scribe 3.5 was successful. But, alas, I haven't been able to import my cards into Zotero, despite having carefully followed all the instructions: show all, export rdf, import the exporteditems.rdf file in Zotero, etc. I tried twice, but keep on getting the message: "Alert No translator could be found for the given file." Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks in advance for your help.
Laura

I just would like to reinforce the need for a specific author item type in Zotero.
This would be very useful for many history researches.
Do you have any hint on a good item type to catalog authors? I've been doing it in a rough way, as "documents". Biographic information is in abstract and notes...