Another awesome library-related web tool (the first I mentioned was “LibraryElf”:http://www.existdifferently.com/archives/2005/01/16/library-elf/) is the “bookmarklet(Google for term to define)”:http://www.google.com/search?q=bookmarklet creation tool over at “Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup”:http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookup.html page. If you live in Indianapolis, Indiana (or in the county of Marion in Indiana), you can use his customize tool to “build your own bookmarklet”:http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookupGenerator.html that lets you, when browsing Amazon.com or another similar web merchant, click this bookmarklet in your toolbar to open a search for that book at your local library! Easy way to save money buying a book that’s at your library!
This is very cool. If you go to the “Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library(IMCPL)”:http://www.imcpl.org/ you can just drag this link to your bookmarks/favorites/links bar, go to a page at Amazon (see “my LibraryElf post”:http://www.existdifferently.com/archives/2005/01/16/library-elf/ for some Amazon links), and click the bookmarklet to try it yourself! It seems that IMCPL returns the identical match in a list of search results, but it seems the exact ISBN match is the third item down, so click the third ISBN down in the results to see the actual book information.
Note that if you use his “custom bookmarklet generator”:http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookupGenerator.html (which I did to create the link above) the values for IMCPL are:
Base URL: http: //catalog.imcpl.org/
Library Name: [whatever you want to call the link]
Vendor: "iPac" is the one you must select
(note: remove the space between the “http” and the “catalog.imcpl.org” above, I had to add it to get it to show up correctly in this post)
I provide this information because it was very hard to figure out that “iPac” was the correct vendor type, since it doesn’t mention that specific vendor anywhere on IMCPL’s site. Try it, you’ll like it!