bibliography

[danco]

Out of curiosity (I'm certainly not going to change) I looked at what Delicious Library 2 offered.

I found a feature it has that Bookpedia doesn't that might be of great use to academics.

It will export a bibliography in a number of standard formats (including both forms in the Chicago Manual of Style).

I'm just writing an article at present and need a bibliography. the books aren't my own, but I could always scan the codes into an collection excluded from the main library, and then if I could export to a bibliography that might be much the fastest way to work.

[Nora]

Sure you can export your Bookpedia data in bibliography format, although at the moment only MLA style format is supported. To create a bibliography, select all the books you want to include and use the 'Copy as bibliography' command found under the Edit menu. Then you can open a text editor and paste. Alternatively, you can also select the books, hold down the option key and drag them straight from Bookpedia's table view into your text editor window. (If you don't hold down Option, the links to the books will be copied instead.)

[druid]

Thanks for the tip on the "Copy as bibliography" command. I just tried it, with mixed results:

All titles are underlined. The preferred MLA style for titles is italics, also preferred by publishers.
Author names appear as Last, First, but not in A-Z order, although I sorted the Bp file by author.
Several entries begin with a comma, space, and then the author name, as First, Last.
As in: , James T. Farrell . No Star is Lost. New York: Popular Library, 1961.
I don't see anything in the Bp original to cause this glitch.

Given this output, I'd have to copy to Word, globally replace underlines with italics, and sort the entries in ascending order.
I tried exporting to EndNote, but it gets confused about the author names, reading them as James, T. Farrell.
Is there a way to convert all the Bp names to Last, First?

[Conor]

You are correct that the preferred formatting for a digital bibliography is italics and not underline. I have updated the formatting and made sure that the order of the entries is kept (sort by author last name before creating the bibliography, this might require an option click on the header). Download the beta and those two things will be fixed. The comma at the beginning of the author I could not replicate. If you are willing to send me a couple of the entries I can try it with your data. To send me an entry simply drag it to the Finder to create a .bcard file that you can email us.

[h0351506]

As a feature request, can bibliographies be exported en masse and ordered from a collection, and do so in formats other than MLA (like perhaps CSE)?

[Conor]

The first two request have always existed. You can select as many entries as you want and copy/paste for the bibliography, they will also keep the order that you give them in Bookpedia. For CSE and other formats there so many rules and edge cases for each that they are complicated to implement. In the future we will try to make our implementation of the MLA format more flexible so that we can add the others as well; thank you for the feedback.