[Papyrus-L] Papyrus to Biblioscape conversion

[Dr Andrew Wilson]

For the benefit of anyone else trying a Papyrus to Biblioscape conversion,
here's an update on problems and (partial) solutions. Thanks to Hugh Gunz
for helpful suggestions:

>>2. Other programs seem to insist on numeric dates. So dates like
"1992-1993"
>>are problematic, also "forthcoming 2002" and "in press". The import to
>>Biblioscape just omits these so the date is blank.

>Could you use the "Date_freeform" field? I think that was what it was
>created for in Biblioscape 4. Admittedly this would be a bit clumsy:
>presumably you could set the import filter so that it puts the date in both
>the "Year" field and the "Date_freeform" field, so that if the former can't
>accept the date, it will still go into the latter. But that might require
>messing around with the output filter as well when it comes to formatting
>bibliographies. Not elegant.

I'd originally tried this, setting the import filter to put Y1 into both the
Year and the Date_Freeform field. However, that for some reason resulted in
the year not being imported at all, to either field. However, Hugh Gunz's
suggestion caused me to perservere - I found that if you modify the RIS OUT
format in Papyrus to output the date twice, once as Y1 and once as Y2, you
can successfully import Y1 into the date field and Y2 into the Date_Freeform
field. I haven't yet figured out how to index this field - can't seem to do
it from within Biblioscape, but it may be possible using the Bdedorx.exe
utility.



>>3. I haven't yet found a way to import notecards into Biblioscape. The
>>suggestion recently posted on this list that you could put them in the
Notes
>>field of a reference won't work if you have multiple notecards for some
>>references.

>Actually, that isn't too serious a problem: any number of notecards can go
>into the Notes field (it can take 256 MB of data, or something like that).
>Of course you lose the field-by-field formatting of the notecards that
>Papyrus gave them, unfortunately.

>Hugh Gunz
>University of Toronto

- OK, I can see that that might be the best available compromise.
But how do I get the notecards out of Papyrus in a form that Biblioscape can
accept them? I can't see any way to tag the notecards in the (modified) RIS
OUT format, or to control their position so that they appear before the
end-of-record marker. They simply get appended after the reference record,
in Papyrus' standard format.


By the way, for the benefit of any others trying this migration route, I
forgot to say in my earlier emails that if you have accented characters in
your database, you can only preserve these by opening the Papyrus output
file created by listing with RIS OUT in Wordpad as a DOS TXT file, and
saving it as a Windows TXT file. Otherwise the ASCII-ANSI transfer loses
your accents. Wordpad or Word is also the place to strip out the # prefix
from your keywords, if you used that in Papyrus.


--

Dr Andrew Wilson
University Lecturer in Roman Archaeology
Institute of Archaeology
36 Beaumont St
Oxford
OX1 2PG

Tel: +44 (0)1865 278247
Fax: +44 (0)1865 278254

e-mail: andrew.wilson at archaeology.ox.ac.uk
Web page: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~corp0057/