[Papyrus-L] Moving from Papyrus to a Windows-based Bibliographic Reference Manager

[Duncan Branley]

--On 31 July 2002 12:59 -0500 "Barden, Howard (MED, LUNAR)" 
<Howard.Barden at med.ge.com> wrote:

> I currently have over 13,000 references in Papyrus, but am thinking of
> moving to a Window's-based platform. I am wondering if anyone has had
> problems in moving Papyrus references to one of the popular
> Window's-based programs such as Reference Manager?  Is this move
> possible, difficult, easy, etc. Thanks for your input.

When development of a Windows version was finally knocked on the head last 
year we decided to move our site to EndNote for both PCs and Macs. It has 
proved popular with staff and students.

Moving references is not difficult.  I've written detailed instructions for 
our staff and students to move from DOS Papyrus 7.16c to EndNote 5.0.2, via 
a text editor (I've used Word).  The method improves on the instructions 
available on the RSD and EndNote sites:
- All fields and notecards for all reference types are included.
- Most non-English, Western-European characters are preserved.
- Markup for italicisation etc within a field is retained (but is not 
converted into eg italics)
It's been successfully road tested by a couple of research students here, 
so I'd be happy to send it to Dave, if he wants to post it on the site.

One thing you should be aware of if you have used the Papyrus reference 
number in filing your hard copies (which has been advised against on 
numerous occasions): these will not be convereted into the new reference 
numbers in any other programmes, but the method described above does 
include them as labels so that you can continue to refer to them for 
already entered references.  This also has an impact on any documents 
you're currently writing.

You should have a look at other programmes too - it depends what your needs 
are.

Hugh Gunz and Martin Evans at Toronto has done some good work getting 
references into Biblioscape <www.biblioscape.com>, which you might want to 
look at.  His instructions are brief and work very easily.  I'm trying to 
build on that and non-English characters at present for a different 
project, but can't say when it'll bear fruit.

Duncan

===================================================
Duncan Branley  duncan at gold.ac.uk
  Applications Officer, Information Services
    Goldsmiths' College, University of London
      New Cross, LONDON  SE14 6NW
Tel: +44 (0)20 7919 7708  Fax: +44 (0)20 7919 7556
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