Google Books ignores Editors

sanovich
Edited volumes from Google books never ever are saved to Zotero with correct identification of editors. They are always listed as authors. Could it be fixed?
  • adamsmith
    may not be possible (google books isn't exactly known for good metadata) but if you have a couple of sample URLs we can take a look.
  • sanovich
    Thanks for a quick response!

    https://books.google.com/books?id=6hFNrgEACAAJ

    https://books.google.com/books?id=5JWIBwAAQBAJ

    In Bibliographic information of both it says Editor(s)
  • adamsmith
    yeah, as I feared, while you're right that google seems to be aware of this internally, it's neither in the xml data we use for import:
    books.google.com/books/feeds/volumes/5JWIBwAAQBAJ
    (note the simple dc.creator), nor in the bibliographic output formats (BibTeX, Endnote, RefMan) at the bottom of the page. I don't think there's much we can do without making import from google book a lot more fragile. Sorry.
  • aurimas
    I don't think it would make import more fragile, but this would be a good amount of effort to supplement our data with what's on the page. Probably more complicated by various localizations too. I think it's worth considering.
  • bwiernik
    Would it be possible to just scrape the ISBN from the page or XML and pass that to the WorldCat translator? That is what I manually do every time due to the poor quality of the Google Books metadata.
  • adamsmith
    possible yes. Not sure how risky, though, in terms of getting data for a different edition. Also, I'm a bit uneasy doing the ISBN thing--can't quite put my finger on it, but it seems wrong (conceptually, not morally) to use data from a different source. But I may be completely off with that.
  • aurimas
    I agree. This would be a hack and a quite difficult one to keep consistent across translators. We should only scrape metadata available on the current site and let the Zotero client fill in missing/incorrect pieces. That functionality will be coming soon (I'm adding it for Feed Reader)
  • bwiernik
    Sounds reasonable to me.

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