Put the books online please
I’m using EndNote. It’s a piece of software for creating and organising bibliographies. You type in metadata such as Author, Title, ISBN, Publication Date, Publisher, City of Publication and so on. Lots of information – and it takes time to type it all in, so that you can automatically cite and build decent footnotes and bibliographies.
It’s a bit like ripping a CD and having to type all the song titles into iTunes – except that problem has been solved by CDDB. You put the CD in the drive, it queries an online database, and all of the metadata is retrieved.
I want to do this with books in Endnote. I want to type in the ISBN number or the author and title, and have all of the other information auto complete.
You’d think with all the bookstores, libraries and academic publications in the world that this would already have been solved. It may well have been – but I haven’t found it. Can someone either please point me towards the solution or set about fixing this dreadful oversight?
A backend database for Endnote would be a good way of doing this. I know you can tap into libraries that you have membership for, and import records and lists – but that’s not the same thing as typing in a 10-digit ISBN code, and having the record automatically just fill up with info.
Thanks in advance.
UPDATE: OttoBib will generate a bibliographic reference from an ISBN. That rocks – thanks, Tom. But I still want the cite-while-you-write integration of Endnote.
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