LibraryThing bibliography export

'allo.

I was looking at using the JSON API in my rewrite of the LibraryThing to BibTeX (http://kevin.godby.org/lt2bib/) exporter. (And at the same time expanding it to present the bibliography in other formats such as APA, MLA, etc.)

There are a few data structure changes that would make this pretty easy, if possible:

* For each book, have an authors array, where each author is its own element in the array. Or at the very least, we'd need to have the other_authors field.
* The publisher and their location (in separate fields if possible).
* The edition (first, second, third, etc.).
* If the book is in a series, it'd be cool to have the series title and the volume number of the book. This is probably in a different dataset on your end, though.

I think that covers most of the information that goes into bibliography entries for books.

Once the tags are working, I could pretty easily generate a bibliography of all books tagged with a particular tag. That'd be useful for doing things like "give me a bibliography of all my books tagged 'thesis'."

Thanks!

Because this site was linked from ottobib, I assumed it already *has* a bibtex export feature. Until it does it's useless to me...

On the work details page, at the bottom, it has Citations. All it does is pass the ISBN to ottobib, which is easy.

LT does not have the publisher information in separate fields, nor the edition information, in its own data, so it would be hard to have it come out that way in the JSON data.

We also have Zotero support on all book pages. From that you can create book lists and export to any number of bibliographic formats. It's really the way to go because it offers management of various sets of books, tags, etc. Once you install the FF plugin a little book appears in your address bar to allow you to add that book to your zotero collection.

And one day when just have nothing else to do I'll add it to all work pages too.

Ottobib will give you a BibTeX citation for each individual book, but not for your entire collection. I wrote a script to export your entire collection to BibTeX here:

http://kevin.godby.org/lt2bib/

If the data I requested were available via the API, then you could generate the bibliography without having to upload a file -- just provide your username and APi key:

http://kevin.godby.org/lt2bib/test/

4: Any chance of adding it to pages with multiple books: catalog pages, author pages, series pages, etc.? On some sites (library catalog search results, google books), Zotero can allow you to select multiple items. That would be extremely useful for exporting from LT in bulk.

Yes, that was also in my plans.

Big plans....big plans. :)

Thanks for your great script! One problem with it: if there is no author, it creates something like BOOK{UnknownAuthor2002a,. Zotero chokes on this and doesn't process anything else in the list after the first entry without an author. Any workaround other than adding authors to the 300 or so titles I have in my LT library without them?

I'll have to look into it. Unfortunately, if you are in need of a solution in the next week or so mine won't be it. I'm quite bogged down in some new feature code that we're trying to get out the door and can't repurpose until that's finished.