Importing multiple ISBNs, some of which may be invalid

I would like to import multiple ISBNs, some of which may be invalid.
The wand tool in the Zotero tool opens a dialog box for entering ISBNs and DOIs.
Entering a single invalid ISBN results in an error message.
Entering multiple ISBN some of which are invalid gives a silent failure; how does one get notified that some ISBNs failed? (Requesting this warning please).

What are other ways of entering multiple ISBNs? Is there a command line argument that takes a file, or website?
  • By invalid you just mean that Zotero can't find metadata for them, right? Because if they're strictly speaking invalid (i.e. the check digit is incorrect), that's of course easy to check from the commandline.

    I don't have a great solution for the ISBNs but one way to check would be to re-export the imported ISBNs as .csv and compare the ISBN column to your imported ones (though unfortunately, for ISBNs imported via Worldcat, results will have multiple ISBNs)
  • Thanks Adam; yes, the export .csv method would work, but requires extra work to diff the csv.

    Could we add a feature request to pop a dialog with ISBN entries for which Zotero could not produce an entry for (either invalid ISBN checkdigit or no metadata).
    Or at least print something to an error console or error file?
  • @dstillman would have to say if they can think of an elegant way to show an error with a list of identifiers not imported. If possible, that seems like a good idea to me.

    FWIW, if you run debug output while importing, copying the full output to a text editor and searching for "No search results found for ISBN" will get you all ISBNs that weren't successfully imported.

    I don't think we can write those into regular error reports (which have the advantage of being less noisy and not having to be turned on).
  • I just wanted to open a new thread requesting something similar, but I'm glad to see that this is already being discussed. Improvements to the way multi ISBN imports are handled would be highly appreciated. But good to know that we can use the debug output to get some sort of feedback.
  • We can probably just use the same progress window used for PDF retrieval and PDF metadata retrieval, maybe with a slight alteration to allow unrecognized identifiers to be copied to the clipboard. Issue created.
  • Good idea. What about filtering invalid identifiers even before the lookup process?
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