An ingenious and elegant thing

Jon Udell: LibraryLookup homepage

If your local public (or college) library is one of these Innovative, Voyager, iPac, or DRA Web-enabled libraries, find your library on the list and drag its link to your browser’s link toolbar.

[ . . . ]

After you’ve “installed” your bookmarklet in this way, you can look up books at your local library. Let’s say you’re on a book-related site (Amazon, BN, isbn.nu, All Consuming, possibly others), and a book’s info page is your current page. (Specifically: its URL contains an ISBN. Choose a hardcover edition for best results — see tips below.) You can click your bookmarklet to check if the book is available in your local library. The bookmarklet will invoke your library’s lookup service, feed it the ISBN, and pop up a new window with the result.

This is is very clever, and since I belong to two iPac-using libraries, it’s twice as cool for me.

It makes me think I could do this to make affiliated links for Amazon a lot less painful.

For some reason, when I first tried it, it didn’t work until I replaced the encoded spaces (the %20 characters) with spaces. This morning, it works fine. Wasted the author’s time, I’m afraid, but I found that replacing “spl” with “kcls” makes the King County Library System just as accessible.


javascript:var%20re=/[\/-](\d{9,9}[\dX])|isbn=(\d{9,9}[\dX])/i;if(re.test(location.href)==true)
{var%20isbn=RegExp.$1;if(isbn.length==0){isbn=RegExp.$2};
void(win=window.open(‘http://ipac.kcls.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?
index=ISBN&term=’+isbn,’KCLS LibraryLookup’,’scrollbars=1,resizable=1,width=575,height=500′))};