How can we (small academic publisher) add our books to Zotero database?

lpleditions

We publish in full open access, our books have ISBNs and we would like our researchers and students to be able to find and add the references to their Zotero library through the "magic wand" button.

However, when searching with ISBN, title or author name, we get the following message: Zotero could not find any identifiers in your input. Please verify your input and try again.

I understand that Zotero automatically searches some databases to add references, but:

- Is there a manual way for me to do this?
- If not, to which databases can I add the books so that they are added ASAP?

Example of one of our books: ISBN 978-989-9179-02-8

Thanks in advance.

adamsmith

Zotero queries library catalogs for ISBNs:
Library of Congress, Biblitheque National de France, K10+ in Germany, Worldcat, and a couple of additional ones based on the ISBN region. There's no other way to get the ISBN recognized by Zotero than getting it into large library catalogs, I'm afraid: there just isn't any other available database with ISBN metadata.

ulahcherubim

I have a similar question. Is there any way to add another regional ISBN database to Zotero's lookup for ISBN metadata? I am asking for books published in Turkey. I don't know how Zotero look that up, if I know how it works, I can ask relevant institutions in Turkey to provide a way for Zotero. Thank you.

migugg

Given that zotero queries worldcat, I guess the best and easiest thing you could do is ask these libraries to add their catalogues (or rather more of their catalogues) to worldcat. as you can see here: https://search.worldcat.org/libraries (you can select a city anywhere in the world in the upper right corner of the window to show you relevant libraries).
many turkish libraries already have some of their books on worldcat, but it appears that none of them have their full catalogue integrated. Making their library catalogue accessible through worldcat would have further benefits beyond zotero as well.

ulahcherubim

Thank you, I will give it a try.

adamsmith

@ulahcherubim -- I'm generally very interested in adding more regional ISBN databases, especially for places that are poorly represented in the current sources.

What we need is a database that
a) has reasonably good coverage of an ISBN registration group

b) crucially, has an open API that can be queried via ISBN to retrieve metadata for books. Unfortunately, as far as I have been able to find, the existence of such an API strongly correlates with representation in existing catalogs: a number of European countries do have one, Japan does, but I haven't been able to find anything in Latin America, Africa, or the Middle East (though for the latter, language is also an issue).

lpleditions

Thanks everyone. @adamsmith is there any way to know which catalogs (with or without open APIs) does Zotero use to retrieve this metadata in Portugal?

ulahcherubim

In Turkey, complete collection of ISBN metadata is held by a department under ministry of culture. From my discussions with their operatives, no such API exist for extraction of data from their databases. @adamsmith if your guess is true, what can be done in order to achieve more representation? I will try asking for integration with WorldCat but that might be a long shot since there would be some bureaucray involved in such an effort.
I am a big fan of Zotero and there are so many of my colleagues using it, but entering metadata manually holds us back from promoting it to wider circles like graduate students and PhD candidates.

adamsmith

@lpleditions -- we don't currently use a dedicated database for Portugal, so any metadata that comes in would come from LoC, K10+, or (most likely) Worldcat.
That said, BNP does have an API as described, so this would be possible to add (here's my current crowd-sourced list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U1tLAGRjsTdwwfPHPdQD4TSwfOgu5TKyKalVgA6Zxi8/edit#gid=0 )

@ulahcherubim not much we can do without an API for ISBNs. It does look like Millî Kütüphane's catalog would be supportable for web import, though. Not sure how comprehensive that is?

ulahcherubim

@adamsmith Millî Kütüphane has 1.402.627 books catalogued. It has the most comprehensive library in Turkey. From what I understand, web import should be done by them, right?

lpleditions

Thanks @adamsmith, we'll try to get our ebooks catalogued through BNP. I can see that they're registered on Worldcat.

adamsmith

@ulahcherubim -- the Millî Kütüphane catalog (https://kasif.mkutup.gov.tr/Default.aspx ) is now better supported using both the Turkish and English interface. This is when using the "Save to Zotero" button in the browser; it won't help with Add by ISBN -- as per the above, only an API with help there.