ISBNs not found

dbrear

I often find that Zotero fails to find details of the book I've just dropped in.

I've just dropped in a pdf - it presented as a Journal Article. Adding it by Identifier failed - the book has 4 ISBNs, I tried three, it found none of them. Yet Googling for 'ISBN 978-1-80008-945-7' finds the full details immediately, with links to bookshops stocking it.

Zotero is generally excellent - it finds most books - but of course that just makes these niggles seem more important! Does anyone else have problems?

dstillman

That ISBN works for me. If you've tried to add a bunch of ISBNs at once, you might be getting blocked by one of the upstream metadata sources (specifically WorldCat). There's no central repository of ISBN metadata like there is for DOIs.

If you provide a Debug ID for an attempt that fails, we could tell you more.

dbrear

REALLY? I do check this stuff before I complain. I'm in the middle of something but I'll try again when I can.

But I'm not going to trouble you with every file (small proportion) that fails. You might like to try a couple that have just failed though - 978-1-908996-62-6 and 1-57098-053-5. Both perfectly clear on the page but the second is OCRd. Both Irish, if that makes any difference!

dstillman

I'm not trying the files, but those ISBNs all work for me via Add Item by Identifier, yes.