Inspired by Edward Vielmetti’s Greasemonkey script for Google Books and the Ann Arbor District Library, I adapted the script for the Municipal Library Consortium of St. Louis. Basically, for any single book listing on Google Book Search, the script grabs the ISBN and does a lookup of MLC holdings. It then inserts a link right on the Google Books page telling you if the book is available in any of the MLC libraries (Brentwood, Ferguson, Kirkwood, Maplewood, Richmond Heights, Rock Hill, University City, Valley Park and Webster Groves). For now, it doesn’t tell you which one, but you can click the link to find out.
Here’s the script: Google Books MLC Library Lookup
Still to do:
- add a xISBN query
- provide alternate searches for items without ISBNs
- modify it for the St. Louis County system
You’ll need Firefox and Greasemonkey to make it work. For credits, I’ll just quote the Superpatron:
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.
March 9th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Good job!
My wish list includes
- inserting the availability links into the search results page, so you can see 10 at a time
- pulling some other metadata, like maybe subject headings, and displaying that
thanks
Ed
(ps Library Camp in Ann Arbor on April 14 - interested?)