ISBN & DOI-- a primer

I was excited about Zotero (see yesterday's post and previous posts) and had the chance to show it to a colleague. He asked a great question, and I realized I probably needed to introduce educators to these tools as they are very useful in the web-centric world in which Google dominates.

ISBN's are International Standard Book Numbers-- these 13-digit numbers identify every book that is published (a few years ago the standard switched from 10 digits to 13 digits, thus many books have two ISBN's).

DOI's are Digital Object Identifiers-- these much longer than 13-digit "numbers" (letters are also allowed in doi's--sometimes the acronym is capitalized, sometimes not) are assigned by publishers to articles that are published in periodicals, and because most periodicals are accessed via online databases, these facilitate searching.

When you find an ISBN or a DOI, you can enter it in a search box (you can Google it) and the details of the resources are immediately available--and ISBN's and doi's can be entered into Zotero to be automatically added to your bibliography.

Try it... 

copy and paste this bold text: 10.1080/01972240600567170 into Google and you will find details of this article:
Deuze, M. (2006). Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture. The Information Society, 22(2), 63-75.


copy and paste this bold text: 9780385533065 into Google and you will find details of this book:
Christian, B. (2011). The most human human : what talking with computers teaches us about what it means to be alive (1st ed.). New York: Doubleday.