I’m a grad student currently evaluating bibliography managers for use with my dissertation, and would like to know if there’s any chance Endnote will ever be able to import my Zotero library with its attachments intact.
Compared to any other bibliography manger, Zotero currently seems the best at automatically downloading and storing reference information and full text PDFs, as well as a snapshot of the webpage if a PDF is not available, from the most number of online catalogues. (See a partial list here). The list is constantly growing, and any changes in a website that break the existing translators are quickly caught and the translator fixed to work again. However Zotero doesn’t have the flexibility and customizability of dedicated reference mangers like Endnote or Bookends, and feels a bit cramped running only in a browser window.
For this reason, I’d like to use Zotero as a ‘frontend’ to my workflow, as a tool for gathering reference information online, while using a program built to handle a large database with many groups and finer control over bibliography styles and formatting, like Endnote or Bookends (I’m on a Mac). I have recently downloaded trial versions of both of these programs, but whichever offers the ability to correctly import the Zotero database along with all its attachments (esp. PDFs) intact will get my money.
Apparently Zotero uses an SQLite database, and the only export format it offers that includes attachments is in RDF format (Resource Description Framework, an open standard for XML metadata).
Will Endnote ever be able to import the Zotero RDF library with its attachments?