Library Web Chic

Tim Spalding announce on the code4lib list last week that LibraryThing now has a beta JSON API for retrieve the core work data. This is pretty cool and I can’t wait to check it out. He also said that an API for member books is coming. Which means I’ll finally be able to pull the books I want from my LibraryThing Account and display them on my blog (the current widgets just don’t do what I want). More about the API announcment on the Thingology LibraryThing ideas blog

Tim’s announcement prompted me to email him and whine that I wanted a way to easily move from my LibraryThing account to searching for a particular book in my account at my public library. Well, much to my surprise this functionality already exists. I didn’t find it because it is sort of hidden. At least from me who doesn’t often go to the individual book page. So in the hopes of educating so folks about this nice feature, I’ve wrote a little how to.

1. Just click from your catalog to the work page. (this is the page for the individual book record)
2. In the top right hand corner there is an area that says “Buy, borrow, swap or view.” It typically has links to bookstores and Worldcat.org in it by default
3. Click the pencil icon in the top right corner of this box. This will allow you to edit them links in this list. You can add new links, delete ones you don’t want (most of them), and reorder the list
4. Look below for a link to your library catalog
5. If link is present add it
6. If isn’t present, you can go to the top of the page and “add a link”
   The biggest thing about doing this is you need to know how to form a direct link to an ISBN in your library catalog. Yeah I know not the easier thing to do. But if you want a hint or two go to the LibraryLookup Bookmarklet generator and use it to figure out how a link to a specific ISBN is built. What I did was figure out that Harris County Public Library uses a Dynix iPac and then clicked on the example link to see how the url was formed. I had to mess with the index name a bit by viewing the keyword search source code in Harris County Public Library’s catalog but I was able to figure it out with 5 mins.

I also went in and added a link for the University of Houston Libraries catalog which happens to be an Innovative Interfaces site. What I put in was http://library.uh.edu/search/i=MAGICNUMBER . Doing this is really easy and I’m kind of surprise more libraries haven’t added links to their catalog. There seem to be a fair number of public libraries that have added themselves, but academic libraries seem to be missing. This is a real shame since I use LibraryThing for research as well as keeping track of my fun reading. Hopefully these directions will help some other libraries or library patrons add their library catalog to the list of possible choices!