Inserting library holdings information into Google Book Search

Google Books Ann Arbor Library Lookup. Requires Firefox and Greasemonkey.

UPDATE: Welcome Google Blog readers and Library Journal readers. See more like this at Library Camp April 14, 2006 in Ann Arbor.

Google Books has a "find in a library" link on some, but not all, of the books in their collection. This is odd because at a glance a lot of the works have ISBNs that could be turned into library queries. (Not all the books have ISBNs so it wouldn't be a universal search string).

I've taken the code from Jon Udell's Library Lookup and mashed it around until it inserts a link to my library's holdings of that book right on the Google Books screen. The useful bit of data is an ISBN number on some pages that can be turned into the link. If it is too old to have an ISBN, I punted; the better thing to do would be a title search.

Not done this go around: any kind of xISBN lookups. Sorry.

You can see the results here for the Ann Arbor District Library in this Greasemonkey script: Google Books Ann Arbor Library Lookup. It should be readily adaptable by anyone who has a copy of the Amazon library lookup for their library. A Flickr screenshot is here.

Thanks Jessamyn West and Kevin Yezbick for the ideas, and to Gordon Mohr for Javascript help. Jon Udell gets credit for the original script. I used the Joe Hewitt's Firebug debugger to figure out what was going wrong with my first couple of tries, and Gordon's Regex Powertoy got me started.

Technorati Tags: aadl, googlebooks, javascript, library2.0, librarylookup, mashup

Comments

[kevinyezbick]

Awesome! This thing has been rattling around in my head for months now, I tell you about it and I am freed from my demons the very next morning! Thanks Ed! (The exclamation marks are for excitement!!!!)

[maire]

Thanks again Ed! I was tinkering with this idea, and even tried a few, but with no luck. You truly are the superpatron!

[Edward Vielmetti]

I think the script could be better - it only does its stuff on the view of a single book page, and it really should give you a full page of holdings listings on the search results page. Not for tonight though.

[Edward Vielmetti]

First port I've seen in the wild goes to Alejandro at the Tec de Monterey library - details here: http://biblioteca.itesm.mx/blog/?p=67

[Alejandro]

Alejandro here. Thanks for the link! The adapted script had to deal with the OPAC status messages in spanish (no big deal); the problem now is that since our OPAC houses the collections of 34+ libraries, it would be much more useful if the link inside Google Books told you if it's available inmediately, or that you have to request it from a sister library...

[Richard Stiennon]

I love it.

[Tom Mandel]

This is why God invented geeks.

[Laura]

Thank you so much for this! One of our other librarians showed this to me, and I've adapted it for our library. It's wonderful!!!!

[L**kup Now]

Very Infomrative site, found it quite educational. I'll definately bookmark this.

[Edward Vielmetti]

I am suspicious that this has stopped working for Firefox 3.x; the next task I think is to re-release it, and use the opportunity to splice in the pictures of books on the myaccounts page described at

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/superpatron/2008/08/wall-of-books-r.html