This is probably a question for Graham Smith, for whom I am not sure whether he still accesses this forum, but I'm posting it here as it might be of interest to others as well.

In the course of my recently resumed studies I will require some sort of bibliographic database. I am reluctant to use a dedicated product, such as Endnote, but the advantages are obvious; my university even provides as with an Endnote style file to use with the Harvard referencing system.

In the spirit of less CRIMP and more effectiveness through integration of specific tools, I am thinking of ways to integrate such a bibliographic database with my current setup, i.e. Brainstorm as a 'short term memory' / text processor and UltraRecall / Zoot as long term repositories of project info and reference material.

Has anyone done something similar, either with Endnote or other relevant products like Biblioscape? Ideally, I would like to keep my reference material in my current repositories linked to/from the dedicated bibliographical database.

I imagine that I could create the relevant bibliographic fields in a delimited Zoot database, but my experience with such customising is still very limited.

alx

Alexander, I probably should have put my post re Zoot here, rather than start a new thread. But in the Zoot thread post I have copied a very interesting post on using Zoot as the recipient of Library of Congress bib data.

Daly

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

This is probably a question for Graham Smith, for whom I am not sure whether he still
accesses this forum, but I'm posting it here as it might be of interest to others as
well.

In the course of my recently resumed studies I will require some sort of
bibliographic database. I am reluctant to use a dedicated product, such as Endnote,
but the advantages are obvious; my university even provides as with an Endnote style
file to use with the Harvard referencing system.

In the spirit of less CRIMP and more
effectiveness through integration of specific tools, I am thinking of ways to
integrate such a bibliographic database with my current setup, i.e. Brainstorm as a
'short term memory' / text processor and UltraRecall / Zoot as long term repositories
of project info and reference material.

Has anyone done something similar, either
with Endnote or other relevant products like Biblioscape? Ideally, I would like to
keep my reference material in my current repositories linked to/from the dedicated
bibliographical database.

I imagine that I could create the relevant
bibliographic fields in a delimited Zoot database, but my experience with such
customising is still very limited.

alx

Daly, thanks, no problem; actually I was the newby in question over at the Zoot forum! I think Robert Brown's answer was well worth reproducing here.

alx

Alx,

This is probably a question for Graham Smith, for whom I am not sure whether he still
accesses this forum,

I am still here, just very hectic, and trying not to spend time crimping.

As regards Zoot, others have answered. However, I think a dedicated bibliographic databases is something you shouldn't try and avoid. You can make it the pet program in Zoot and still feel as if you are running everything from Zoot.

Compiling bibliographies is a boring and tedious chore, even storing the data is tedious because different sources need different types of information stored and to set everything up in Zoot is not making the best use of time as you are still left with problems getting it back out.

So while I understand the desire to stick with what you have. I stongly advise getting a proper bibliographic tool. Not surprisingly, I have spent a lot of money on such programs with licenses for Endnote, biblioscape, papyrus, library master, citation, and a couple of others I can't remember. But I am currently using Zotero and Jabref. Neither are perfect, but both a free, and useful. I love Zotero, but it still has some rough edges.

Graham

Graham, many thanks; nice to hear from you. Our situations are rather similar I gather.

I decided to take your suggestion, as expressed by others at the Zoot forum as well, and go for a dedicated program. The advantage for me is that I have never gathered bibliographic data before, so any starting point will probably do.

I have downloaded a demo of Endnote and will try Zotero as well.

Thanks again
Alexander

(Graham) one more thing: can you remind me which bibliographic programs one can link to externally, i.e. use a URL such as endnote://1234567 to summon specific records?

alx

Alx,

(Graham) one more thing: can you remind me which bibliographic programs one can link
to externally, i.e. use a URL such as endnote://1234567 to summon specific
records?

I haven't ever done that, what I have done is taken advantage of Library Master and Biblioscape using simple text tags to compile bibliographies, so you can add in-text citations into Brainstorm (for example), export the text into Word, and then use the LM or Biblioscape to properly format the in text references and compile the bibliography.

Graham

Hi,

I'm regular user of Ultra Recall (and their forum). I use Bibtex format for my bibliography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibtex
For managing Bibtex I was using JabRef.
I was able to import my whole Bibtex bibliography (about 100 of articles/books/thesis ...) into UR by creating custom attributes (via CSV import). So now I'm managing my Bibliography inside UR, have various categories, citation searches, links, ... and when I need to write a paper or presentation -> export to CSV and convert to Bibtex ...

quant

Has anyone done something similar, either
with Endnote or other relevant products like Biblioscape? Ideally, I would like to
keep my reference material in my current repositories linked to/from the dedicated
bibliographical database.

I imagine that I could create the relevant
bibliographic fields in a delimited Zoot database, but my experience with such
customising is still very limited.

alx

Many thanks; this is a very interesting approach.

Admittedly, after trying several workarounds to maintain use of my regular software I decided to use something more specialised. After trying Endnote, I finally opted for IdeaMason.

alx