Wordpress Plugin to add items from Open WorldCat

I’ve been thinking about how I link to books I cite on my blog and really wanting to have an easier way to create these links. How I do this now is to open a new tab and go do an Amazon search for that I want then copy and paste the url from Amazon into my blog. Obviously I’m not the only person who find this annoying because there is a Wordpress plugin (WP-Amazon) to make this process easier.

From my perspective this is cool, but not ideal. I want people to be able to find the item not necessarily buy the item. So in my mind I’d love to link from my blog to Open WorldCat which would allow people to figure out where the nearest library is to them which has the item. I talked to Lorcan Dempsey about this at ALA Midwinter. Particularly since I hadn’t had luck cutting and pasting urls from Open WorldCat record page into my blog. He told me that permalinking is coming to Open WorldCat (hurray) and that in the near future I would be able to get a link I could paste into my blog and actually have it work out of Open WorldCat.

I tried this recently and Open WorldCat now has a “Bookmark This” link that you can (if you’re smart) figure out how to get a permalink from. I wish that this as a little easier. So I could right click on the link and “Copy this Link” or FURL this link. But maybe this will come soon.

So is this even possible? One would think so. On OCLC’s site there is a page entitled “API for WorldCat linking partners” which talks about the API for linking into Open WorldCat. There is also a page that talk about how to “Link directly to an ISBN/ISSN”. So if you know the ISBN or ISSN it is easy to create a link to Open WorldCat. I suppose that I could use AWS to find the item and get a proper ISBN/ISSN and then change how the link is constructed so it goes to Open WorldCat instead of Amazon. But truthfully this would be a nasty hack and it would be better to find the item in OpenWorldCat and create a link to that. There also seems to be a possibility here to incorporate OCLC’s xISBN service. I need to dig around on the OCLC site a little bit more many of the pieces seem to be there. Also, I noticed this week on the Library Thing blog a note that says “Book-info pages now link to a number of booksellers as well as the OCLC “Find in a Library” service.” All this bodes well for the possibility of adding this kind of functionality into Wordpress. Oh if only I could find some time to work on the code!

Update

Lorcan Dempsey posted a comment (I don’t know what I did to it. Probably click the “spam button” instead of the “approve” because I’ve been getting so much comment spam!) that says that there is now a permalink in the top right hand corner of Open WorldCat. To this I say “hooray!” I can add links to Open WorldCat into my blog more easily now. But pretty please is there any way someone there would be willing to help me build my plugin? That would make the blogging workflow even smoother!