March 11, 2006

By Sheila Lennon / The Providence (R.I.) Journal

2:13 p.m. Saturday (Blogroll)

See a book on Amazon, reserve it at your library (part 2): On this rainy morning, I worked out the LibraryLookup bookmarklet for the statewide Providence Public Library catalog search and drove downtown to blog it.

-- What it does: Drag this link -- PPL -- to your personal link toolbar (the one with Home, Bookmarks, etc.).
-- Click it when you're at the page of a book that interests you at Amazon.com and other online booksellers, and it will open a separate window to the book's page at the Providence Public Library.
-- Here you can see whether it's on the shelf, you can log in and request it, or just add it to your personal list of books you want to read sometime.

Here's an example of what will happen if you click that bookmarklet while you're at on a book's page at an online retailer.

Jon says it works at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, isbn.nu, and All Consuming. It also works for me at Powell's and Booksense.

(Please open a new window with yesterday's Part 1 for the background.)

Or, you can do this manually: (Nearly?) every commercially published book has a number, an ISBN ('International Standard Book Number'). If an online page has an ISBN on it, you can feed that number into your library's catalog search and find it in your local library.

For the Providence Public Library catalog, this is the base URL for an ISBN search: http://pac.provlib.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?index=ISBNEX&term=

followed by an ISBN number. This is the ISBN number for The 9/11 Commission Report: 0393326713

This is the url for that search:

http://pac.provlib.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?index=ISBNEX&term=0393326713

Retrace my steps: Jon Udell's LibraryLookup bookmarklet reads the isbn number off a Web page, inserts it into this lookup, and makes it pop up as a separate page.

If you use his form, the base URL is http://pac.provlib.org
In the bookmarklet I made, I abbreviated the name of the library to PPL -- I didn't want the whole name taking up space on my toolbar.
Choose the radio button for iPAC.

For Providence, and several other systems, after you save the bookmarklet, you need to go into your bookmark manager, and edit/rename the ISBN term in the url to ISBNEX. Save, and it should work for you, too.