Monday November 07, 2005 Requesting Your Amazon Books From Your Library
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This is so cool! I love little hacks like this. I started at a 43Folders post that pointed at a post on Jon Udell's Radio Blog. |
When you get there, you have a Library Lookup Bookmarklet generator. You need to
know the base URL for your library system. For my local library (Los Altos, California)
this is just http://146.74.92.11. You then give the Library Name and
check the type of Vendor (i.e. what kind of online library system they are using), which in
my case was iPac. Then click on the Build your own LibraryLookup bookmarklet!
button.
I then set the generated bookmarklet up as a bookmark in my Personal Toolbar Folder and tried it. I went to Amazon, found a book I wanted to request from the library, then clicked on the Los Altos Library toolbar bookmarklet.
It didn't work. I then had to debug it, and found that my library requires the generated URL to be of the form index=ISBNEX rather than the default index=ISBN. Jon quite clearly mentions that this is a distinct possibility for some iPac library systems, I edited the bookmark properties, adjusted appropriately and voila! I can now easily request books I find on Amazon, via my library library with one click (actually 2 clicks because I have to then hit the Request Item button on the newly created library search web page.
What I'm finding from playing around with this useful tool is that quite often my library doesn't have the books I'm interested in (either because they are too new or presumably because they weren't of enough general interest). In this case, the search result indicates that the item wasn't found, so I simply add it to my Amazon Wish List.
I only have one minor gripe. I wish that when you click on the LibraryLookup bookmarklet, the newly created window would appear on top. I did have two gripes, but it was easy to work out what to do to make the newly created window larger that what the JavaScript creates by default.
Congratulations to Jon Udell for one neat hack!
( Nov 07 2005, 07:02:34 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [2]
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Posted by shaun on November 07, 2005 at 04:46 PM PST #
This is what the bookmarket looks like (hoping that I don't lose any special HTML characters):
javascript:var%20re=/([\/-]|is[bs]n=)(\d{7,9}[\dX])/i;if(re.test(location.href)==true){var%20isbn=RegExp.$2;void(win=window.open('http://146.74.92.11'+'/ipac20/ipac.jsp?index=ISBNEX&term='+isbn,'LibraryLookup','scrollbars=1,resizable=1,location=1,width=775,height=700'))}I tried adding ";win.focus()" near the end (to the left of the last ")", but it stopped working completely then.
Posted by Rich Burridge on November 07, 2005 at 05:58 PM PST #