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Ottobib - Automatic bibliographies for back-to-schoolers
by Jason Clarke Sep 20th 2006 at 8:00AM
I can't tell you how excited my wife was to find this site. She was almost as excited about the prospect of never having to carefully format another bibliography as she was to be able to point me to a site worthy of posting at Download Squad. Ottobib is a site that allows you to simply type in the ISBN number of a book that you need to reference, then choose the style that the bibliography must be written in, and it spits back your fully formatted bibliography. Simple as that. Yet another tool that solves a simple problem in a simple manner. In fact, I would think someone could make a killing writing a plug-in for Word that did exactly this. Hmm...
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Gerard Harrison said 12:13PM on 9-20-2006
This site seems to work a little erratically. On several searches, it left out the city of publication, inserting the word "City" as a placeholder. On others, it messed up capitalization. You might be able to use it to show you the correct form for an MLA, or other cite form, but I wouldn't count on it for content.
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Brett said 11:56PM on 9-20-2006
This would be sweet if it worked for more than just books.
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EngGuru said 11:56AM on 9-30-2006
Oh come on, this is nothing.
First, have you actually tried it? The "bibliography" produced by this thing is horrible -- which makes sense, because who knows what formatting irregularities there are in the databases that the tool is pulling from. If a student handed in the results of this tool thinking "a computer did this, it must be right," they'd be in trouble.
Second, this mechanism is already built into some of the Web-based bibliographic software out there. It is nothing new -- and any software that doesn't already incorporate it can easily do so via a service like ISBNdb.com that has an API.
Third, since when does anyone do research where all their sources are books? This site as a standalone tool is useless. Fun, good proof of concept, but useless by itself.
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jonathan said 3:04PM on 10-02-2006
hey, you're right about ottobib, it's not working very well. but it does get its data from isbndb.org, and whatever else it can't find from amazon. the bibliographic databases out there are not good enough yet for this service to be solid. i am working on more ways to get more information.
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