A digital workspace for my dissertation now exists. In this post, I want to discuss a few tips for building a bibliographic database, quickly. Manan had recommended to me Zotero, which is basically Endnote, if Endnote didn’t suck, knew what the hell the internet was, and was free.
For the time being, Zotero’s main flaw is that, despite being a Firefox extension, your bibdb is not stored on the Tubes, so, paradoxically, you still have to carry around a USB key with your .rdf file. This will change with the new version of Zotero, but that version is not yet here.
Last night, then, I pulled every book in my library that I thought would be used in my dissertation proposal—about 90 books, off the top of my head. I then opened up Google books, typed the ISBN of every book, and then added each hit to my Zotero database.
It was only when I was exporting the information into BibTeX (its own headache that will provide fodder for a post in the future) that I noticed how awful the Google books database actually was!
First, though I did notice this earlier, it managed to mishandle nearly every volume with more than one creator. I could handle a munging together of editor and translator as second and third authors… but Google Books also added half-filled names all over the place.
Second, Google Books clipped titles!
Third, Google Books couldn’t get straight several publishing houses’ names, often running the word “Press” right up against whatever was right before it.
Fourth—and Amazon did this too—Google Books could not be bothered to include a place of publishing in its database. This is a vital isssue for me, as MLA style certainly still demands that bit of information in their bibliographies. Maybe our globalized world means that the location will fade in bibliographic importance, but I need stuff up to current standards.
Fifth, and most egregious, however, was that though I searched for and found the books using their ISBN number, Google Books would not port the ISBN number over, either, into Zotero. Every other fuckup would be tolerable if, at least, I had a (mostly) unique identifier with which I could look up the book in the library catalog to fill out the information that Google Books had screwed up.
No such luck. Try again, sucker.
So now I have a bibliography of 90 texts, where each text has something wrong with it (no place data), and no easy key with which to look things up in the library catalog. So pretty much last night was a complete waste…
…except that I do have enough meta data now (a general list, plus knowledge of what all the covers look like) to use a combination of LENS and the library catalog to reimport every item.
I hope that this all falls at the guilty feet of Google and not Zotero, since the process was so annoying as to make me ready to throw a pox on both houses. So now I’ll rebuild everything and see if Zotero can play as advertised.
So the tip here, then: don’t use Google Books for anything serious. Use the library catalog. The UofC catalog ports over to Zotero call numbers, series titles—and ISBN. As long as I keep the authors and their roles straight, it is through the catalog that I get everything I need. Google Books simply assumes I need a headache.
Basically Zotero is still on the ok list, as long as I use it with a real, academic catalog (I imagine Worldcat is as nice), then.
Tags: academic workflow, bibliography, bibtex, google, zotero
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