Bulk import of ISBNs

kyasar
Is there a way of importing a long list of ISBNs (separated by spaces, commas, hard returns, what have you)? Alternately, does anybody know a way of bulk converting an ISBN list into one of Zotero's accepted import formats? I apologize if this has already been addressed, but my search of the forum didn't yield anything.
  • adamsmith
    while this is planned (for DOIs, ISBNs, and PMIDs), it's not currently available in Zotero. I'm not aware of an ISBN look-up that would let you get input a list of ISBNs and return a Zotero readable format, but it may very well exist

    (it may also depend how tech-savy you are: I haven't looked into this much, but the LoC's SRU can output marcxml, which Zotero can import:
    http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/specs/search-retrieve.html
    Individual ISBN searches take the form:
    http://z3950.loc.gov:7090/voyager?version=1.1&operation=searchRetrieve&query=dc.resourceIdentifier=9780199286546&maximumRecords=1
    I don't know if you can search for multiple ISBNs, though - you'd have to look at the docs).
  • ajlyon
    This could be done pretty easily as an import translator, building off of the existing ISBN search translator. Not that I'm volunteering to do so at this time.
  • Eallynm
    What's the status report for the plans to implement a batch ISBN (in CSV or tab-delimited format) in Zotero? Any plans to add UIEE as an import format for books?
  • dstillman
    @Eallynm: This thread is from 2012, and you've been able to import multiple identifiers into Zotero for many years by pasting them newline-delimited into Add Item by Identifier. But there's no reliable service/API for ISBNs the way there is from DOIs, so the best we can do is try to get data from various sites, and you may get blocked by those sites if you try to import too many.

    In general I don't believe we do any rate-limiting in Add Item by Identifier, so it's not currently really designed for importing huge number of items at once.
  • adamsmith
    As for UIEE -- I don't think we've had a single request for this before and it is my understanding that it's principally used by booksellers, so I don't think it's something that any of the regular people adding import/export formats would work on, but we'd accept 3rd party contributed code.
  • Eallynm
    Yes, I know that this post was from 2012, and I knew that one could import ISBNs by pasting them one at a time with new-lines between them. I should have described my problem in more detail. Most of my home library (thousands of books) is in Readerware. I'd like to be able to transfer all or some of those book listings from Readerware to Zotero with as little re-entering as possible. Most (but not all) have ISBNs. Here's a link describing Readerware's export formats. What do you recommend?
  • adamsmith
    Not sure we're on the same page with ISBNs, so just to be clear: you don't have to paste them one-by-one. You can just take a list like

    978-1-79360-413-2
    978-0-521-77059-0
    978-0-8422-7088-5

    and copy it into the "Add by identifier" window. As dstillman says, we haven't optimized this for importing thousands of ISBNs, so I'd go maybe 50-100 at a time, but especially if these are mainly English books likely to be found in the Library of Congress (which is our first try and doesn't tend to rate limit easily), you'll likely be fine.

    None of the Readerware export formats are supported and likely won't be in the future, but given the above, I'd export to CSV and then just go through the table and copy the ISBNs to be added.

    An alternative, if you like playing with technology, would be to use MARCEdit to convert the CSV/TSV file to MARCXML and import that, see https://guides.library.illinois.edu/c.php?g=463460&p=3168299
  • Eallynm
    Thanks1
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