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I am more and more pleased with my database. Part of this is simply acquiring greater familiarity with how Filemaker functions and what it can do, especially playing with portals, scripts, and buttons. My notecard database is now ever so much more useful, since my bibliographic database now automatically finds the notecards which are related to the bibliographic source one is looking at. Yes, I know, this doesn't count as real work, but it's still satifsying, and the goal is to make real work easier to accomplish.
Other positive and related notes: I was very happy to receive an emailed reminder from Steve, a past graduate of my current program, encouraging me to submit a paper for Avista's K'zoo session. I'm still intending to do it, and must work on it very very soon. I need to decide exactly what I would like to do the paper on. Also, in response to the party invite, I received a lovely list of possibly useful sources from Jess, the PhD student with whom I currently have the most research interests in common. Very kind of him.
Other positive and related notes: I was very happy to receive an emailed reminder from Steve, a past graduate of my current program, encouraging me to submit a paper for Avista's K'zoo session. I'm still intending to do it, and must work on it very very soon. I need to decide exactly what I would like to do the paper on. Also, in response to the party invite, I received a lovely list of possibly useful sources from Jess, the PhD student with whom I currently have the most research interests in common. Very kind of him.
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There are certain things I do lack thus far, however, which may prove quite optional, which Endnote can do. Endnote is infinitely better than my database at slurping data into bibliographic formats - more to the point, it comes pretemplated to do so. I've tried to make mine somewhat adaptable, to the extent that my PrimaryAuthor field starts by only containing the last name of the first author (although complete names in FirstName LastName order) with separate fields for the author's first name and suffix. Little things like that. If I'm feeling enthusiastic, I'll post a screenshot or two when I get back to Toronto to show off my handiwork.
Also, Endnote can do connections to major databases. Now, this could be quite useful, but, if the field formats the databases use are publicly accessible (haven't checked) then my boyfriend promised me he could script something to duplicate that feature. But we haven't tried it.
Having invested in the expense of Filemaker, I figured there was no point investing in another database-type solution if I could make Filemaker do most of what I wanted anyways. We'll see... if I get desperate for an Endnote feature I can't recreate, at least I know my current database should be very easy to export to Filemaker - downside would be, of course, I lose all my lovely additional fields, which I'm terribly fond of. And my nifty buttons and scripts and pretty colors and formatting.
Give me a few days and I'll show you more of what I'm speaking of.