I plan to make a catalog of all the books I own. Nearly 5k from literature over art to scientific books.
I chosed JabRef for its flexibility and the storage principles. Since I had an bad experience with an book collector app, wich stopped the MacOs support and I not able to use my data anymore.
Some books I own in different editions. e.g. Arno Schmidt Zettel’s Traum in 7 different copies. Or complete Brittanica’s from 1929 and 1976.
I do not need to cite the entries, I wrote my chemistry PhD thesis in 1991 with latex and did not publish scientific texts since then.
I would love to contact someone who had an similar task, to avoid to many unnecessary effort. Or to get an hint of an best practice example.
I startet with my copies of the works of Arno Schmidt and had to import manually or edit nearly every entry. I have tried the ISBN search, but the master data had only mediocre quality
In JabRef 5.6 the provider of bibliographic data when fetched via ISBN had to be switched. See release notes “[Now,] We first fetch ISBN data from OpenLibrary, if nothing found, ebook.de is tried.” If you encounter any problems feel free to report it here or at GitHub.
Import via ID works pretty well for DOI. It queries www.doi.org, which in turn queries from crossref, but yes, there can always be server outages (albeit rarely) or insufficient provision of metadata. There are multiple providers of metadata all over the world and if a specific publisher of the book you bought has failed to enter their data into the database JabRef is querying, JabRef simply will have no access and it would need magic to do it. JabRef is not running on magic. Neither are providers of metadata.
Yes, having a look over the entry you imported is a good habit.
I remember there was an idea about a barcode/ISBN/DOI scanner in JabRef, but it never was implemented. That definitely could have helped you with your task
But the real problem are the data in the sources. If have checked the entries for Arno Schmidt Bargfelder Ausgabe in the DNB ( Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) and found these untidy, to be friendly :-).
I did not expect any magic from JabRef and very glad with the program, for its flexibility. This means, that I can and have to work on the entries, without the feeling that the program knows better than me, what is correct for me. the ones who work with microsoft office know and hate this feeling.
That said. I love JabRef and will invest time to catalog my books.
