Friday, February 16, 2007

OttoBib links added

I've added links to OttoBib, a super-simple citation generator created by Jonathan Otto, an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse.

The feature is available on the work info page (card catalog page) for any specific book—yours or someone else's. Here's an example. At present, it only works for books, not for general works. (After all, a work may have 1,000 ISBNs under it.) We hope to extend this in the near future. The results aren't saved in any way, so if you're doing a bibliography, you'll have to do some cut-and-paste work.

We're linking to OttoBib because we think it was nicely done. But, down the road, LibraryThing may need a stronger solution—one that works with non-ISBN books and which saves and juggles citations, rather than just creating them. We have some ideas along these lines, but your suggestions are always apprecated.

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10 Comments:

Blogger AndrewB said...

Very nice service, I see on their blog they now have a format (/wp) which returns copy-paste code suitable for Wikipedia. :)

2/17/2007 5:55 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

This is wonderful. Thankyou.

2/17/2007 9:06 AM  
Blogger Tim said...

Oh, I added Wikipedia citations.

2/17/2007 1:22 PM  
Blogger AndrewB said...

Thanks Tim, the Wikipedia option could come in handy :)

2/17/2007 6:09 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The wikipedia citation? makes me scream in joy.

2/17/2007 7:16 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you so much, Tim! You have no idea how handy this is going to come over the next few weeks alone...

2/18/2007 10:19 AM  
Blogger Harrison Goodman said...

the question is...can it cite those spam links in MLA?

2/18/2007 5:12 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

Not any more you can't! :)

2/18/2007 8:05 PM  
Blogger Harrison Goodman said...

seriously this time...I've been tinkering with this, and it's incredible. This will save me hours during research papers. Thank you LibraryThing!

2/18/2007 9:19 PM  
Blogger luke clancy said...

that is indeed a great addition. very handy indeed. but it makes one imagine, as i think you are suggesting in your original post, that things could be taken a little further.

For example, it would be very handy to have a library view that contained all your books in APA (or whatever) format, or even better, checkboxes which allowed you to "build" a page of such citations.

It would also be handy if this were exportable / saveable to a text file, for inclusion as a bibliography, references or works cited section in a piece of writing.

Oh, yes, that would be good...

2/27/2007 5:52 AM  

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