Tuesday, July 12, 2005

LibraryLookup

For Mozilla, Firefox, or Netscape, drag-and-drop any of these links to your toolbar to create a LibraryLookup bookmarklet. For Internet Explorer, use Add to Favorites... and create it in Links.

Public librariesCollege and university librariesNow, when you're browsing any site that describes a book by its ISBN (amazon.com, for example), clicking your new toolbar button or link will automagically look that book up in your library's catalog. Yay!

Hooray for Jon Udell, creator of LibraryLookup! (And a little bit of hooray for me, who slaved over a hot keyboard to make these public library bookmarklets.)

TODO: These bookmarks are written to extract the ISBNs from the URL, not the webpage text. Some sites, like O'Reilly, don't use ISBNs in their books' URLs - but still list them in the webpage text. A more sophisticated bookmarklet might be able to find the ISBN there, too. I'd like to write bookmarklets that could find and use those ISBNs, too.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Pretty slick! I'm always finding books at Amazon, then checking to see if it is available at the library.

Suggestion for development: What about a context menu item that let's you highlight ISBN (or title or author, if you want be to ask for the moon) within a web page itself? Sorry, I'm being greedy. What you have done is already a big help.

Does DPL know about this? Seems like the kind of thing they might be willing to highlight on their homepage.