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]
Category: ‘puters
bookmarklet 90% done, can you help us finish it?
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.
don’t like search enginge, wriite your own…
What’s really involved if you, say, wanted to write your own search engine? [unalog]
The Trouble With Online – is it us?
Roy Tennant’s article for Library Journal about the pitfalls of trying to use an OPAC to find articles online is now itself online. I love it when people tak about disturbing failures of our profession.
We exert much more control over our library catalogs than we do with article indexes, where we are at the mercy of vendors. Since our catalogs are at least partly in our control (automated system vendors largely respond to market demand, and we control how we catalog our items), we need to find ways to enable users to limit searches to full text online. Users rightly expect this ability. Their not being able to do it easily, or at all, is a disturbing failure of our profession.
what can you use a wiki for?
Wikis were one of the more foreign things I discussed at my talk. It’s easy to point to Wikipedia and say “Look, a collaboratively built encyclopedia!” but it’s more difficult to explain how a librarian could use it in their own libraries. Today Teleread has a post about using a wiki for a book discussion group where groups can collectively annotate a book club web site. I think this is what the National Science Digital Library was hoping for with its Annotation and Review Services wiki but it seems to have suffered from neglect. Here’s a neat little wiki about blogs.