Importing from Bookends.

wadam
Hello everybody. I am trying to import my relatively large (probably about 5,000 entries) bibliographic database from Sonny Software's Bookends 10. I'm using their RIS bibliographic style to export my entries, and then importing them into Zotero. In doing this, I've come across a couple of hitches that I hope you'll be able to help me solve:

1) In entries where the TY field is CHAP (book chapter), Bookends exports the T1 field as book title and T2 as the chapter title, while Zotero imports it the opposite way around.

2) In all entries, the AB field seems to be imported into a note rather than into the Abstract field.

3) Bookends has A3 as the name of the editor. And this does not seem to be imported into Zotero at all.

Any help with these?

Thanks!

UPDATE: I think that I've solved all of these problems. I went and looked at the spec for RIS files and rewrote the formatting instructions for Bookends. I do have one further problem, however: A lot of my bibliographic entries have diacritics attached to them: how do I get them to export and import correctly?
  • Tjowens
    Zotero should handle diacritics just fine. It just uses unicode. Can you check to see if the characters are being exported properly from Bookends?
  • wadam
    I ended up solving the problem. I too thought that the diacritics should import without trouble. They were fine in the RIS file from which I was importing. After some extensive playing around, the way that I got it to work was to change the "Import Character Encoding" preference in the Advanced tab of the Zotero preferences from 'auto detect' to UTF-8.

    Then it worked.
  • whshep

    I've just done a big conversion from BookEnds 10 to Zotero (6600+ items). There are very good points here, but there may be more to it for those with large, old databases. It's really a major undertaking, with a lot of tweaking to be done to get everything from one place to another.

    I've written up my procedure for converting BookEnds to Zotero which anyone is free to use. Hope it's helpful.

  • jbirdlichatz
    whshep, a huge thank you for this. I am such a newbie at this. Thank you for taking the time to write it up.
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