Standard Ebooks Metadata Errors - Juris-m Connector

edited August 29, 2022
I've noticed a few errors when adding books from Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org) from Juris-m connector 5.0.93.4. I'm guessing it applies to Zotero connector too, since I can't find a commit referencing the site on zotero-connector github repo.

The type of entry (book) and URL fields right.

The title and abstract fields are incorrect.

Fields that could easily be filled, but are not are: author, publisher, and rights (all books on the site are in the public domain in the US).

The date field could easily be filled as well, although it is a bit more of a judgment call. The books are occasionally updated, but the dates of the last few updates are listed with each book entry.

I don't know if the metadata field is accessible, but the editions is based on the commit code for the last update to the book on Github.

There is no PDF available for download. There are several ebook formats available to download, though.

I think that covers everything I can provide to fix this, but let me know if you have any questions. Hope it helps. Thanks for the awesome app!
  • Thanks -- issue created here: https://github.com/zotero/translators/issues/2875 (not sure when someone will get to it: PRs very much welcome)

    Note that what you're currently getting is just the automated metadata, mainly based on the open graph stuff Standardbooks puts in the site header.
  • edited March 20, 2023
    Hi @diwesser - a translator is now available for Standard Ebooks.

    As you noted in your original comment, there were a few decisions to make about saving items. We decided to include the date of the last edit to the ebook as its publication date, rather than the original publication date of the digitized public domain book. Although these are all public domain ebooks with older publication dates, Standard Ebooks is making typographical changes, which could be considered altering them from their form on Project Gutenberg, and thus potentially constitute a new "publication".

    Whether each commit to GitHub for a certain title constitutes a new "edition" is also an interesting question - for now, we opted not to include that in the Edition field, mainly for citation purposes - it seemed like having "Finish metadata and initial publication" as the name of the edition in a bibliography entry for this book (https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/titus-andronicus), for example, would be odd.

    Since there's no PDF, as you note, the HTML page containing the full text of the book is saved as a Full Text Snapshot in the Zotero library. Hope you find the new translator helpful!
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