ISBN auto hyphenation and addition of 978 to older titles

meika
I do not like hyphens in ISBNs, partly because I like to strip them in creating a hashtag, and I do this because any punctuation will break the hashtag:

#9781234567890 preferred
#978-123-45-678-90 becomes #978 on social media platforms

How do I turn it off, I've had a look in settings....

This is one example of why it is annoying (please do not suggest manual workarounds).

What is annoying about this is I do not type in the hyphens BUT they appear auto-annoyingly. How new is this?

Yes it make its easier to read for hoomans but this is a publishing industry database system and the machines they do not care. Publishers use all sorts of formats with hyphens with spaces etc etc

ALSO:
From a Library systems and archives POV what should be used (in a catalog) is what appears in the actual physical book (that's my day job folks, grumpy Karen in a library), now I understand it pulled down from what is available online _BUT_
WHY does it keep changing the ORIGINAL ISBN-10 into a ISBN-13 after I pull it down!!!!! Repeatedly!!!!! And giving it hyphens!!!

I understand that academics and studentshave little understanding of library and GLAM procedures & practices. I could go on.
  • adamsmith
    Sorry, you can't turn this off and we're not going to revert it. As per the ISBN User's Manual: "The elements should each be separated clearly by hyphens or spaces when displayed in human readable form" -- and Zotero fields are designed to be human readable and are also used for citations, where human readability is even more important. (So no, Zotero is not "a publishing industry database system").
    Looking at the code, I think it's been doing this for 8 years, but I'm not 100% sure.

    If you need unhyphenated ISBNs a lot, it's fairly trivial to write an export translator that exports nothing but that and we can tell you how to do that (and you could use that with jus tquicklook)

    As for ISBN 10/ ISBN 13, I think what Zotero is doing there is somewhat questionable: it converts ISBN10s returned from the library catalog into ISBN13s while hyphenating, and I'm guessing that's a bug and not on purpose -- I certainly don't see any reason to do it. @dstillman @AbeJellinek thoughts on that last bit?


  • dstillman
    It's not a bug. 10-digit ISBNs are no longer valid:
    Prior to 2007, the ISBN was 10 digits in length. In January 2007, the 13-digit ISBN launched to increase the capacity of the ISBN system. To date, 13-digit ISBNs assigned by the U.S. ISBN Agency include the 978 prefix, which allowed systems to contain both 10- and 13-digit ISBNs for all books. However, a 13-digit ISBN starting with 979 does not have an equivalent 10-digit ISBN. Once this change takes place, only 13-digit ISBNs starting with 978 or 979 should be used to identify a book.
  • meika
    they are still valid in an archive setting where one records what is on the object not what is in some virtual system that was build to suit publishers, and not librarians, let alone archivists and their methods, (original order, respect du fonds etc etc)

    "no longer valid" in some commercial system suporting trade that some Elon could buy any day now and ruin.

    I know zotero is built for more academically inclined beings and their referencing systems, and so commercial activities might be beneath notice. but from an archival point of view automagically changing what is on the object is bad form.

    ISBN despite their name are not book numbers, they are publisher numbers with a suffix that refers to a unit of trade that publishers distribute through bookseller channels,
  • meika
    edited August 4, 2023
    In addtion searching in Zotero for 9780691244099 (as I entered it into Zotero magic wand to add the book)
    https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691244099/ancient-africa

    does not reveal the book because it the ISBN has been deformed by the dark arts into 978-0-691-24410-5
    see references at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Egypt
    which is not only hyphenated (against my requirements) but refers to some other edition.

    Just a reminded that ISBNs are _not_ "book numbers" (not URIs), but publisher numbers with a suffix that refers to the units they are distributing (often books).

    This is not referencing, and certainly not good long now archival practice.

  • meika
    also thanks for the translator tip
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