Importing online Videos for referencing

[Myles]

Before I go too far down a rabbit hole, I'd like to ask others who may well have seen the obvious, native solution I am missing.

I reference any videos I may have been influenced by, something like this: Title of Video (date uploaded) video, added by Username of uploader [Online]. Available at URL [Accessed date].

Sometimes in a more formal context (i.e. the reference list) and sometimes just in a note that reminds me of what prompted an idea (in the zettlekasten, for instance)

Naturally I want to store these in Bookends - at the moment, I am doing this laboriously, manually and therefore at risk of doing it badly.

I am aware that I could be using a second tool to make it easier - I can use Zotero to capture, save into a watched folder to import into Bookends, for instance - or I could (temporarily) store to DevonThink pro and do something to pull the reference data into Bookends.

But I can't help but think that this must already be covered by the tool directly, after all, I'm not the only person to ever want to reference a video, am I.

[Jon]

I'm assuming the videos don't have a unique identifier (e.g. DOI) and can't be exported from their sources in a tagged format (e.g. RIS). If so, you might see if they have been indexed by Google Scholar. Any that might be could be imported into Bookends. In addition, if you are in a country in which Apple Intelligence has been enabled, while in the browser you are using to access the video, you might ask ChatGPT (via Writing Tools) to copy the metadata as RIS to the clipboard and import into Bookends from there. This sort of example, with PDFs, is mentioned in this thread:

viewtopic.php?t=6256

Jon
Sonny Software

[Myles]

ooh, I like the apple intelligence suggestion! I'll give that one a go... Thank you.

(Never grew up, still thrilled by toys)

[Myles]

it seems just as easy or easier to use the Zotero browser extension which is available for all browsers I might use and automate the export/import of the RIS.

Be nice to have one for Bookends too.

And the web to pdf functionality of the Zotero extension as well, come to that.

[Jon]

I'm not sure what you mean by web to pdf functionality. Bookends can import and attach the web page in Bookends Browser (saved as a .webarchive, so any links in it are live). Or if you want the PDF, in your standalone browser, press Command-P (Print) and from the PDF popup menu at the bottom select "Save PDF to Bookends", which will import and attach the PDF.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Myles]

Given a video that is on a webpage I could also scrape the page on which it is published - like this:

Code: Select all

import requests

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import nltk



def scrape_youtube_citation(url):

    response = requests.get(url)

    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')



    title = soup.find('title').text

    author = soup.find('meta', {'itemprop': 'author'}).get('content')

    date = soup.find('meta', {'itemprop': 'uploadDate'}).get('content')



    # NLP processing to format citation based on chosen style

    citation_string = f"{author}, {title} [Video]. YouTube, {date}."

    return citation_string



# Example usage

video_url = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=example_video_id"

citation = scrape_youtube_citation(video_url)

print(citation) 

Or, since just about everything ends up on YouTube reference the YouTube API data...

But this is a rabbit hole, again - Zotero does seem the easier option

[Myles]

Sorry, Jon - I missed your reply to the save as pdf - Yes - I'd found the webarchive version but generally save as pdf to work with the rest of my workflows - I'd completely missed the send pdf to bookends option, which is just what I have needed. Brilliant. Thanks very much.