I love the Internet. I knew that posting yesterday's partial solution to the library lookup problem would prompt someone to prompt me to take the next step. Via Technorati this morning:
jon udell has created a neat tool for quickly checking libraries in north america for books by ISBN. all this needs is some geographic location data for each library, and a bookmarklet to parse an amazon URL for ISBN, and he'll have a wonderful tool allowing anyone to use amazon's recommendations to find books at local libraries. if you following the previous links, you'll discover that all of the required parts of this tool already exist. someone just needs to put them all together. [ randomchaos]
I knew that a bookmarklet was part of the answer. The example given is Amazon-specific, so I generalized it to use a regexp that I've tested with Amazon, BN, isbn.nu, and All Consuming. The geographic piece was what was really bothering me. You'll laugh when you see the solution I came up with:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookup.html
It's just a page of bookmarklets, one per library. Pick your library, drag it to the toolbar, and then hit the link when your current URL is book-related.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/12/11.html#a536