Library Web Chic

Open WorldCat Annoyances

I've been using the Open WorldCat Bookmarklet recently and discovered a
significant and seriously annoying difference between using it (but
really Open WorldCat in general) at work and at home. When I use Open
WorldCat at work, it knows that I am on SUNY Cortland's campus and I
get a “SUNY Cortland” version of OpenWorldCat with our SFX button and a
link to our catalog. When I use Open WorldCat at home I don't get any
of this, which is annoying. The reason is it is easy to see if my
library has the book via Open WorldCat by putting in my zip code.
However, at home, there is no easy way to go from the Open WorldCat
record to interlibrary loaning the book if we don't have it. At work I
can use the SFX link to send an OpenURL request to ILLiad. However, at
home, I have to either generate a request from scratch or go in and
find the record and link to ILL via our pay version of WorldCat.

Now
this problem could be solved with something like the Firefox
extension that added links to your local OpenURL resolver to Google
Scholar. Building an extension that adds the type same links to all the
OpenWorldCat records would allow me to easily see if we own the item
and ILL it. In my humble opinion, Yahoo (which allows for
personalization) could do their users a great service by allowing them
to select their “home library” and adding these type of links to the
OpenWorldCat results.