As you will have seen if you poke around these pages, I have a Google Library of books in sta­tis­tics and fore­cast­ing. This is intended to be a com­plete copy of what is on the shelves in my office (about 400 books), plus books that I would like on my shelves if I had more space.

I find the library use­ful for keep­ing track of books that my stu­dents and col­leagues bor­row (I just add a tag con­tain­ing their name to the book). It is also use­ful when search­ing for a book on a par­tic­u­lar topic, espe­cially as Google pro­vides con­tent searches of many books.

Sim­i­lar facil­i­ties are pro­vided by Library­Thing, but I find the Google Books inter­face nicer to use and it also has the in-​​text search­ing which is amazing.

Recently I thought it would be use­ful to cre­ate a Bib­TeX file of these books. Unfor­tu­nately, Google does not pro­vide a Bib­TeX export of books (unlike Google Scholar where there is a very handy Bib­TeX export facil­ity). In the improb­a­ble event that any­one else attempts this, here is how I did it.

1. I exported my Google library as an xml file.
2. I signed up for a life-​​time Library­Thing account for US$25. Not that I wanted to use Library­Thing, but there is a Bib­TeX export facil­ity which I wanted to use.
3. I imported my Google Library into Library­Thing sim­ply by upload­ing the xml file saved earlier.
4. I waited for a while for the library to be cre­ated. (I’m not sure how long it was because I had a tea-​​break, but it was less than 30 minutes.)
5. I went to /kevin.godby.org/lt2bib/ where I fol­lowed the prompts to save my Library­Thing as an xls file, then to con­vert it to a bib file.
6. I loaded the bib file into JabRef to auto­gen­er­ate the bib­tex keys using the pat­tern I use (e.g., “Hyndman08” for a sin­gle author paper in 2008 and HKOS08 for the book by Hyn­d­man, Koehler, Ord and Sny­der in 2008.)
7. Then there was a lot of edit­ing of the bib file to remove dupli­cates, etc.

Prob­lems:

• Library­Thing is hope­less at iden­ti­fy­ing all the authors. Often it just lists the first author. I couldn’t find any way around that. So my bib file has lots of entries with only the first author listed. I’ll have to fix these by hand over time.
• The titles often con­tain extra­ne­ous infor­ma­tion such as edi­tion num­bers, series infor­ma­tion, etc. Again, this will require some man­ual editing.
• I can’t see any way of updat­ing my bib file as I add books to my Google Library. Does any­one have any bright ideas?

Related Posts:

• Search­ing the sta­tis­ti­cal literature
• Man­ag­ing a bib­li­o­graphic database
• Search­ing the research literature
• Fore­cast­ing and time series books
• Fol­low­ing authors on Google Scholar