bibliophilic bliss

[ursamajor]

OMIGOD THIS IS SO COOL.

so while i was waiting for the kitchen floor to dry so i could go make dinner, i was reading about an awesome library bookmarklet.

basically, let's say you're looking at amazon, for example, browsing the new jamie oliver cookbook. now, of course, i don't really have $23 to spend on a cookbook these days, and i shouldn't be buying them when my local library is within walking distance. :P particularly not from borders, much as i love it, when a new independent bookstore just opened up right next to my grocery store, so if i'm buying books i should be supporting the indies. but that's not the point! so normally, i'd copy-paste the info into a notepad file, and then go place the appropriate information into the catalog. a bunch of annoying, tedious clicking.

instead of all that annoying process, you install the bookmarklet by dragging it to your bookmarks bar, and then any time you're on an amazon page for a particular book (or barnes and noble, isbn.com, etc), you click on the bookmarklet and it pops up the search results for your local library's catalog for that particular book! (and in my case, lets me request a copy be put aside for me!)

or, well, it *should*. but apparently this came around a couple of years ago, and some of the bookmarklets are out of date. never fear, cantabrigians (and anybody else whose library belongs to the minuteman library network)! i did a wee bit of recoding, and the new bookmarklet is available here. just follow the instructions on that page to put it into your own web browser. :) (lj won't let me put it directly in an entry. pah.)

so with one click from that page, i can find out that everybody else in the world wants the new jamie oliver cookbook, too, and that i'm #6 in line for the next copy to come back. le sigh. :)

Comments

awesome!

[avocados-number.livejournal.com]

Wow, nifty! That gosh-darn technology sure is wonderful. (Although, really, this bookmarklet thing probably is not all that intuitive for the masses.) I am happy to note that the Free Library of Philadelphia is supported. My hometown library, unfortunately, is not, because they don't use any of the supported library vendors (the county just made up its own web catalog system). I investigated quite a bit, and according to the "lmxac" site help, you should be able to search by ISBN, but if you actually look at the site, you actually can't. Which means I can't write up my own little bookmarklet for them.

Wait a minute... now that I think about it, I don't really know why I would ever use this. Why would I be searching for the item on Amazon as opposed to just looking it up in my library catalog to begin with? Hmmm. Well, still! It's neat that it exists! And so many libraries all over the place are supported! Hurrah!

Re: awesome!

[ursamajor]

Well, the primary reason for its coolness is that when a lot of people are talking about books on their LJs or blogs, they often link to them on amazon.com or borders or bn or somesuch - eg, you're not about to give me a link to find a book in the CPL, and matt a link to find it in Princeton, etc - you're going to give a universally usable link. This is just something nifty for the end-reader. :)

Plus, the advantage of using ISBN numbers is that you don't have to worry about proper punctuation! Which in the case of some authors, can be rather complex and lead to much misunderstanding.

Re: awesome!

[avocados-number.livejournal.com]

Aha. Good point. I didn't think about the fact that I would have followed the Amazon or BN link from someone's plan or LJ. Now I see how it would be helpful! And of course I still think it's cool just for existing at all.