With the new Properties and Datatable functionality, I’m wondering if anyone knows of a relatively easy and seamless way to import book/journal data (say from Endnote, or Zotero, or even a plain CSV file) that can populate a file with matching properties (Title, Publisher, Year, Ratings etc)… so that if say there are a hundred books, each one can be imported into a separate file with the book title/author as the file name?
A number of plugins would solve this for you, most notably Zotero Integration and Zotlit. Both of these can bulk create literature notes from Zotero, using templates to define how you place and format the data in your note.
See the examples here of how that’s done for Zotero Integration, and here for Zotlit.
There’s also Zotero Sync Client that bulk imports by default.
As for other reference managers, you’re stuck with the Citations plugin, but it doesn’t do bulk literature note creation, as far as I know. Alternatively, if you can code, you could make a script that can process bibtex or JSON bibliographies.
Thanks … this is helpful… sorry of this a dumb question but it seems, if I have say 10,000 records, I’ll have to open the import option from Zotero Integration 10,000 times?
Ideally what id want is something that can import each line of an excel sheet into a separate record and some way to match the excel columns (Author, Title, Publisher … etc) with corresponding Properties in an Obsidian file?
No worries, you’re welcome!
As for your question, no, that’s not the case. You can either use the classic view option in the citation picker dialog, or you can use scripting options utilizing Zotero Integration’s runImport API. If you need to work with an excel file, the latter is your only option. But I would recommend starting with an export from Zotero. See this script I made yesterday for reference: Bulk Import Zotero Library Annotations into Obsidian with Zotero Integration plugin - #7 by Feralflora
Thanks… will take me a while to figure out as I dont know the scripting language.
So, just to be clear, to import an Xcel file (saved as .csv or .xlsx) with say 100 records I can use the Zotero Integration runImport, or did you mean just scripting options… if scripting options can you point me in the direction as to how such a script can be written (such that I can specify field columns to match up to Properties in Obsidian)?
You can only use runImport if the references you want to create literature notes on are in your Zotero library. So what I meant regarding the excel file was simply using some form of custom script. If you want to forgo the use of Zotero Integration, and format literature notes directly based on metadata in the Excel file, the script would have to be much more complex than otherwise.
Like I said, my advice would be to get your references into Zotero first and then work from there. Reference managers like Zotero should easily outdo something like Excel in this case, unless your use case is very dependent on Excel for some reason. Perhaps you can say a bit more about this Excel file, how it is formatted, and why you use it instead of a reference manager?
It’s a little convoluted, but well before Zotero and Endnote I had back in the 90’s a FileMaker database that I created to manage my bibliography/references. Then I started using Endnote (reluctantly)… switched to Sente, but also I realized that liked to see my books with cover images displayed (like the colorful but limited and now defunct Delicious Library)… anyway eventually since 2010 I started using Zotero. However I have a lot of custom fields and a complete backup of all my data in Endnote (I had fields for notes, various ratings, etc). However because Zotero has limited fields, I’m still trying to find a convenient solution to have all the various forms of data I want in one place… Now that I’ve discovered Obsidian, I’m thinking this might be the solution I’ve been looking for as I can keep the complete data set from Endnote by transforming Obsidian into a variation on Endnote, and once all the data is in I can then simply use Obsidian / Zotero from here on out … I’ll use Zotero for gathering resources and annotating, while keeping the main database in Obsidian. So basically I want Obsidian to import all my Endnote data (mapping all the Endnote fields , including my custom fields, into Obsidian Properties which I can create) … Once I have all the data in Obsidian, I will then start using Zotero to input highlight and notes I make in Zotero. This way Obsidian becomes the primary center for my book like.
Endnote can export its libraries in rtf, which, using a custom script, I then convert to a tab delimited file and import into Excel (where each column corresponds to the Endnote fields)… usually that’s a format that many other Book ref managers can import from (including Zotero, Bookends, Bookpedia, etc)… I was hoping that Obsidian could simply import an excel file so that it created a note for each book. And then I can link each Book record with Zotero via the Zotero-Obsidian integration methods. So Im not committed to excel, its just where I have all my endnote book data in a convenient format… but if Obsidian can import directly from Endnote that can work too… I did try exporting Endnote to HTML and then using the importer plugin (which can import HTML)… but it just produces one giant file with all the data… and there does not seem to be a way to import into a templated Book format with one note for each book.