Modernize Book type?

ryofurue · October 20, 2023

I find Zotero's "Book" type outdated. Currently DOI has to put to "extra" and there isn't any provisions for multiple ISBNs: a single book can have up to three ISBNs, one for the hard cover, one for the soft cover, and the other for the eBook version.

I think DOI should be a proper field and multiple ISBNs should be allowed.

Does this make sense? If so, where should I submit this feature request?

Also, what should we do with the chapters of eBooks? An eBook often has separate PDFs and separate DOIs for individual chapters. I suppose we need a systematic method to record this information and store downloaded PDF files within the entry of the eBook, or otherwise to create a hierarchy of entries. Currently it's easy to create one Zotero entry for a chapter but it's tedious to create all the entries for all chapters and it's not obvious how you can combine them under a single book entry.

poettli · October 20, 2023

Regarding the DOI for book and book chapter. This has been discussed several times here. I guess this thread summarize the current situation: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/83096/doi-for-books-and-book-chapters
tl;dr: When the different types will be updated to include a "DOI" field, this information will be directly picked up from the "Extra" field.

Regarding the multiple DOI, I didn't see so much discussion about this.

aborel · October 20, 2023

I suppose creating all entries for multiple chapters should be relatively simple, as long as the web translator for the publisher's platform is good enough for that. If there are problems with this, could you post a link to an ebook where it doesn't work?

I agree that automatically creating and linking both the book reference and the relevant chapter(s) would be nice.

In the previous answer, I guess "multiple DOI" was supposed to be "multiple ISBN"?

ryofurue · October 20, 2023

> When the different types will be updated to include a "DOI" field, this information will be directly picked up from the "Extra" field.

I know that, as I implied in my initial posting. What I've been wondering for a long time is: Why are people here so reluctant to update the types and fields?

Arguably, DOI in `extra` is a kluge (workaround), not a proper "solution".

Digitization only accelerates.

Is there a forum to propose and discuss changes to the types and fields?

ryofurue · October 20, 2023

> I suppose creating all entries for multiple chapters should be relatively simple, as long as the web translator for the publisher's platform is good enough for that.

Thanks. This comment of yours prompted me to re-examine the process. Then, I've now found a method to import the individual chapters all at once into Zotero. The Zotero webbrowser plugin offers such an option, although I don't know this interface applies to all eBooks.

> multiple ISBNs

I imported the eBook again into Zotero and found that the single ISBN field accommodates multiple ISBNs (I don't know how. Perhaps just separate them by a newline character?), but the information of which ISBN corresponds to eBook is lost. Also, only two of the three ISBNs have been imported. I don't know why.

Is it standard with Zotero that multiple "values" are contained in a single field?

For example, for a multiple-author publication, you create multiple author fields. In contrast, a single ISBN field can apparently contain multiple ISBNs. Is this how things should work?

adamsmith · October 20, 2023

No one is reluctant to update item types, it's just a fairly complex undertaking involving import, export, local interface, web interface, API, to some extent citation styles, as well as the migration of existing content. It wasn't even technically possible given the sync and data architecture for some time; now it is, but it's still not a simple "let's just add a couple of fields" thing.

For the ISBN -- having separately entered ISBNs is just not much of a priority in terms of data structure (there are few use cases) and the data model is only as complex as it needs to be.