Category: ‘puters

Meetup.com now includes librarian meetups. While the closest one to me is 130 miles away, this might be fun to pursue in Vermont. [juice]

Jon Udell has come up with a bookmarklet that is non-ISBN dependent that does pretty much what our little hack does. Plus, he talks about this whole REST-versus-SOAP debate where web services are concerned which is new vocabulary for me but worth learning. In old-school library news, a whole class of 4th graders said “No WAY!!” when I told them [and then showed them in the online database] that Tony Hawk was my age and had four kids.

Thanks to Steven Cohen and Michael Fagan and Andrea Mercado [and me, and Michael and Andrew whose emails with similar code I didn’t get til this morning], the WorldCat Lucky Bookmark lives! While I agree with Sarah that we can’t expect our patrons to grok the bookmarklet thing, as much as we might like them to, this one is [nominally] for staff. Go nuts team!
Lucky ‘Cat [in same window]
Lucky ‘Cat [in new window]

Librarians, please go make your own library lookup bookmarklet for your patrons and install it on all of your public access machines. Make it available on your web site. If patrons are smart enough to be using Amazon to look up books, they should also be able to use this bookmarklet. I’m going to try to figure out how to add this functionality to my booklist, now that I have made ISBNs a field in my database [and just added a “buy this at Powell’s” link]

If anyone would like to help Andrea and I with a little Library Lookup app of our own, we’d sure appreciate it. Full details are over on her site. I’m aware that this issue was almost dealt with a few months back and OCLC even has their own bookmarklet page but this is a little different. It combines the bookmarklet whizbang stuff with an OCLC query to take the user from Amazon right to a list of regional libraries. Sometimes you don’t know which library has your book and often time, you don’t know which one to ILL it from. Handy? Sure, if we can get it working right.