LibraryLookup for the Minuteman Library Network
It’s a shame that Amazon.com provides much better facilities for searching and wishlisting books than most local libraries do, since you can save a bunch of cash (not to mention room in your house) by only buying the books which are worth re-reading. Fortunately, Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup bookmarklet tool offers a way to combine the handiness of Amazon’s catalog with the cost savings of library use.
A bookmarklet is a browser bookmark which contains a glob of JavaScript code instead of a URI, so that it becomes a little program which operates on the page you’re currently viewing. In the case of LibraryLookup, it scours the web page you’re looking at for an ISBN number, which it then feeds to your library catalog so that you can jump directly to the listing there.
The Minuteman Library Network is an umbrella organization for many local libraries in the Boston area, including my own Cambridge Public Library. They recently changed their catalog format, and I updated the bookmarklet to work with the new system—here’s the result:
library
To “install” it, just drag the “library” link above to your bookmarks bar. Then, next time you’re looking at some random book on the web, click the “library” bookmarklet and you’ll get a popup showing whether it’s available at any of the Minuteman branches and giving you the ability to reserve it. Enjoy!
Update: It’s worth mentioning that I had some problems posting the bookmarklet code in WordPress for a bit—it turned out that it was eating the backslash characters when saving. I replaced each backslash with %5c, which fixed the issue.
May 26th, 2005 at 9:13 am
Just got down to reading this post, and noticed you mentioned being in the Boston area. Is that still the case? Just curious because I live in the Boston area also.
May 26th, 2005 at 9:24 am
I do–Somerville to be exact…
October 15th, 2005 at 11:15 am
It didn’t work !
What’s supposed to happen when you click on the above link in the shaded rectangle?… “library”
October 18th, 2005 at 3:58 pm
The link in the shaded rectangle is a “bookmarklet”. It doesn’t work as a normal link–you need to drag it to your browser’s bookmarks bar, and then click on it there when you’re viewing a book on Amazon.
July 20th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
This is great! Thanks!
I can’t seem to log onto my library acct to request books on my intel mac… I can on my work non-intel mac, but only sporadically. Have you had any problems with this? I get the following:
Sorry, the information you submitted was invalid. Please try again.
in either Firefox or Safari.
Also, you should check out this cool toolbar widget which tracks when your books are due! I posted about it here:
http://snowboardbunny.livejournal.com/143222.html