Type of site metasearch Created by Jonathan Otto | Owner jonathanotto.com Registration no | |
Slogan(s) Make a bibliography. It's free, easy and OttoMatic. Website | ||
OttoBib.com is a website with a free tool to generate an alphabetized bibliography of books from a list of International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) with output in MLA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, BibTeX and Wikipedia {{cite book}} format. Each query also generates a "temporary" permalink (self-destructs in about one month) which can be used to recall the bibliography without reentering the ISBN data. The site is a metasearch engine, integrating data from several sources, including the U.S. Library of Congress API, the Amazon.com database of books, and ISBNdb.com. OttoBib accepts ISBNs with either 10 or 13 digits.
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Background
OttoBib.com was started as a hobby project in 2006 by Jonathan Otto, a then 4th year undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, USA. It was originally called "That's Crazy Hot!" but the name was quickly changed to OttoBib because the original title was "not suitable for the academic environment and consequently won't take off."
The original inspiration for the site came from Seth Godin's January 3, 2006 blog post on "Stuck Systems", where he wrote:
"A quick online search didn't turn up what seemed obvious to me: a free service that would allow a writer to type in all the ISBNs used in creating a paper and then generate two things:
Functionality
OttoBib.com performs the two basic functions outlined. Marcus P. Zillman, an Internet information retrieval consultant and speaker said "this website is the start of a new paradigm of citing sources." Jason Clarke, a writer and web developer, said OttoBib is a "tool that solves a simple problem in a simple manner."
Developments
In January 2007, OttoBib introduced a REST interface to allow a citation to be generated from a URL that contains the ISBN. For example, ISBN 0-19-511797-2 can be used in the URL:
http://ottobib.com/isbn/0195117972/apato display
Patterson, J., (1997). Grand Expectations. Oxford Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press.In February 2007, OttoBib introduced the ability to request citations in BibTeX and Wikipedia {{cite book}} formats.