Worldcat ISBN matching not working (LoC works fine)

thepezman · March 17, 2020

I have some books I would like to add to Zotero that appear in Worldcat but not Library of Congress. My understanding is that Zotero is supposed to check against both databases, so this shouldn't be a problem. Here are a few examples:

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/875896857
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/922998795
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1107357409

However, anytime I try to copy-paste any of the stated ISBNs from those pages into Zotero's lookup field, I'm told the entry can't be found. When I do the same thing with an entry from LoC, it works just fine.

I'm on Ubuntu 19.10 using Zotero 5.0.84, both currently the latest released versions.

adamsmith · March 17, 2020

Could we get a debug ID (see https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output#zotero ) for Zotero for trying to use add by identifier on
9781940535012
That works for me and should work as you suggest.

thepezman · March 17, 2020

ID: D708565461

Log:
[JavaScript Error: "XML Parsing Error: no root element found Location: http://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=9781940535012 Line Number 1, Column 1:" {file: "http://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=9781940535012" line: 1}]

adamsmith · March 17, 2020

@dstillman , could you take a look?

dstillman · March 18, 2020

(3)(+0000000): HTTP GET http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/875896857?client=worldcat.org-detailed_record&page=endnote

(3)(+0000150): Translate: Importing corrected RIS:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">;
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"; xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">


<script src="https://cdn.cookielaw.org/langswitch/552b78bb-4141-4e1f-aab7-ea2321cbe37c.js"; type="text/javascript" charset="UTF-8" data-document-language="true"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
function OptanonWrapper() { }
</script>


<script type="text/javascript" src="/wcpa/js/survey/foresee.prod.js"></script>
<title>[WorldCat.org]</title>
<meta name="language" content="en" />

@thepezman: This is an-campus network, right? We've seen this a few times in the past, where when Zotero tries to download RIS from an on-campus network with some sort of WorldCat subscription it gets a webpage instead of actual RIS, possibly due to some sort of cookie-based authentication (despite the RIS file being publicly available normally). It'd be best to ask whoever manages your WorldCat subscription about why this might be happening.

Note that you should still be able to save from the WorldCat page using the Save to Zotero button. (I'm not sure if you were actually on those pages to begin with — in which case you should always use the Save to Zotero button — or were just providing those links to show that the data for those ISBNs was available there.)

thepezman · March 19, 2020

@dstillman, thanks for your response!

Does this mean that if I try the ISBN import on a non-campus network, it should work? That seems like the simpler option.

adamsmith · March 19, 2020

Yes, we'd definitely expect this to work on a non-campus network. Let us know if that's not the case.

thepezman · March 20, 2020

Works great! Thanks for helping me get to the bottom of this.