Yesterday I recorded a commentary about LibraryLookup for New Hampshire Public Radio. But when the NHPR folks looked at the bookmarklet generator, they threw down a warning flag. This is pretty geeky stuff, and they quite sensibly don't want to get into the business of tech support. So as a special favor to my home state I went through this list of New Hampshire public libraries and created drag-installable bookmarklets for all of the libraries that I could.
For Amherst, Bedford, Derry, Goffstown, Hooksett, Manchester, Merrimack, Salem, and Wadleigh:
NH LibraryLookup
For other towns:
Concord, Conway, Dover, Exeter, Gilford, Hudson, Hollis, Hopkinton, Howe, Keene, Kimball (Atkinson), Laconia, Lane (Hampton), Lee, Nashua, Portsmouth, Richards (Newport), Rochester, Rye, Smyth (Candia), Tracy (New London), Wiggin (Stratham), Wilton
(This turned out to be a useful exercise. I found two catalog systems that I hadn't known about -- Winnebago and Athena -- and added support for these to the bookmarklet generator.)
If you're a patron of one of these libraries and would like to give LibraryLookup a try, drag the link for your library to your browser's toolbar, then click it from an Amazon book page. Here are some tips for using the bookmarklet.
If all this sounds like Greek to you, here's a tutorial screencast on bookmarklets. It shows, among other things, how to create a LibraryLookup bookmarklet, how to install it in Internet Explorer or Firefox, and how to use it.
Bookmarklets are handy, and the screencast will introduce you to some other useful ones, but I should point out that they're not the ideal way to automate library catalog lookups. In particular, they're not powerful enough to translate among the ISBNs for different editions of the same book. I've recently developed two techniques that use a service provided by the Online Computer Library Center to do this translation. The first one works inside the Firefox browser. The second connects your Amazon wishlist to an RSS feed.
If this sounds like Etruscan to you then don't worry about it, just use the appropriate bookmarklet. These more advanced methods will eventually show up. If you're lucky enough to have a superpatron in town, they'll show up sooner rather than later.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/04/19.html#a1430